pennies in the water

39 days til we move

2010-03-21T14:41:00.002-04:00

Jacob is at the Buzadi's. With Henry. It turned cold. They are in Etobicoke. A drive away I am about to make. Larry was mad because I always act superior he said about how he is attached to things and I am not. And people, he said, unfairly. Which I pointed out. But we didn't talk about.

I was lying down in bed. My heart was hurting from the argument we had, which the second round was no yelling but he described how I was talking to him like a litany. Only he didn't use that word.

It's hard to write about the heart usually. Usually it comes out all cliche. But it was hurting because I was thinking, this is the person I love? And I was thinking I wish he would come to get me. That's the best sign, when the person you loves comes to get you. And I heard him approaching but it was just him on the way to the bathroom.

But then he did. And he said that. About me always acting superior and hating it. And left. But I said to come back. And he came back. And I said thank you for telling me how you feel.

There was going to be a good ending with an insight about the heart but now Larry is cooking something and keeping talking to me and also I have to go get Jacob in a minute. And I can't remember what it was.

Long time no blog

2009-07-30T16:52:00.001-04:00

Larry had a job interview. It went well. Getting ready he pulled down some jeans from the closet he didn’t wear in ages he forgot about that look really nice on him he wore to it. Larry is magic. We were at the Pinery last week and he was making these beautiful ornate funny drawings of nature parts. Bugs, flora, creatures. Larry is listening and hearing the call, his call.

Sometimes I feel like a grabby, clingy bedridden old man. Kids are grabby too. I think I remember remembering not to be that way. To take something given with grace. Feeling the transferring from their hand to mine.

At work Tina’s hands are red. Her husband is a cook and she always has a good lunch. It’s some kind of psoriasis on them. I am thinking I wonder if it’s something Tina is eating causing it, looking at her every day her husband making them for her seeming so nice lunches. Amy said, “Oh you’re not wearing your new ring,” to Tina. Tina said she took it off because she’s always putting cream on her hands pausing, alluding to the problem of her hands. The way Amy said it like it was so nice I got the impression the ring was expensive and had diamonds in it. Maybe because Amy wears jewellery like that.

Larry said the reason they’re not accepting your work at the literary magazines is because it’s different. They’re not used to work like that. I said I didn’t think of it that way, but thank you. Listening.

x-rated

2009-05-18T20:13:00.002-04:00

Poor Iggy has sex on the brain. Lilu doesn't get it; his constant sniffing at her nether regions; the distracted, nostril-flared dazed look on his face; the neck pinning and pelvic thrusts.

She visits me, I think for assurances, more often than she did.

I don't know if Iggy gets what's going on either.

Some months ago, we set Iggy's appointment with the vet for the snipping, except it's not snipping anymore - its laser surgery, for the last weekend of May.

I don't know if we're going to make it.

Love

2009-04-24T10:19:00.007-04:00

Sigh.

Love, love, love. Love, love, love.

Isn’t that how that Beatles song goes?

Jacob was having one of his nightmare things last night, a light one. From out of sleep he joined us in the living room Larry surfing playoff hockey, basketball and watching some Blue Jays too.

To distract him from his brow scrunching bad visions Larry told him the Blue Jays were winning 4-2 in the 8th. In response Jacob switched his bad dream vocalizations to numbers. Six-six, four-two, he mumbled with more anxious trepidation, the numbers taking on the same bad meanings.

Our strategy to help him out was talking to him in normal voices he wasn’t hearing very well because of the dominating bad dream interference going on his head. I said, leave the door open, as he left the living room to return to bed. But he was closing it so I repeated it until he heard.

If there’s anything you need just call, I said. Then fast he said, love. I need love.

If only my blog entries were more socially relevant

2009-04-12T13:55:00.000-04:00

We went out for an art walk yesterday. The funnest stop was at Paul Petro. Andrew Harwood had a show in the upstairs gallery called Psychic Friends. He was dressed in character as a drag queen Madam Zsa Zsa. The lighting was blue. He had his face covered in a veil. There was a swirling disco ball globe in front of him for his crystal ball.

What I liked about him was his intimacy. I was very comfortable with it. It made me realize I am like that too.

Since I know astrology well, I could feel Cancer energy about him. Cancer energy can be the most intimate. It’s water and it’s mother energy. I asked him his birth data and I was right. His Moon is in Cancer as is his Jupiter.

He needed you to get physically close to him to do his “readings.”

He was treating them like they weren’t serious and a joke but also like they were serious. He would say the colour he saw in relation to the question you were asking him. Having a methodology, seeing colours, means seriousness.

Since I am an Aquarius and my masculine side dominates my feminine in an (in my case) unhealthy way, I’m often in my cool aloof Aquarian side. But being with him, like I said, made me realize part of my strength is in my moony Cancer side. Except I’m always hiding and diminishing it.

When I went back on the street in the sunshine outside of the blue light I realized it’s my fear of men often knocking me out of that intimate side. All the scary men and my fear that I can’t be myself around them , that I have to succumb to their perspectives and needs, is how I get knocked out of that intimate side of myself and into my distant Aquarian head.

Also I am reading some literary blogs and feeling very stupid. People organize their thoughts in ways that don’t have the same kind of scope my astrological perspective does.

I’m scared it means they’re better and I don’t belong.

This Seder

2009-04-11T01:26:00.002-04:00

For our Seder, in the kitchen between the main course and desert, after using the bathroom, Jenny, my mother in law complimented me on how clean the toilet bowl was. How did you get it that clean? She wanted to know, her voice in awe.

Really, I was thinking of an answer to her question. I was formulating it. The answer. But getting stuck. What I’d done to get it that clean really wasn’t that incredible. Realizing this made me think Jenny must also know that what I had done to get the toilet bowl the way it was really wasn’t that incredible.

While Jenny was in the bathroom she also cleaned the mirror I noticed after the fact, later in the evening after she’d left. Because I had Larry buy some Windex so I could clean it then I couldn’t figure out how to get it spraying then I went on to do some other house preparations for the Seder and forgot about it.

Then it was clean and I asked and Larry didn’t do it. No one else would have done it. No one else would be so presumptuous. Only the word presumptuous doesn’t come close to what Jenny does. Conversely the word bristling perfectly describes my response to how she acts. Other times, in the past, while visiting and using the bathroom she’s also cleaned the sink, the tap nozzles and the counter surrounding the sink.

Finding myself

2009-04-10T17:11:00.004-04:00

What if a viable strategy to infiltrate the Toronto literary scene was to mill in crowds at literary events in such a photogenic manner that the crowd scenes photographer wouldn't be able to resist snapping pictures featuring me? And when enough of these pictures accumulated some kind of numerical function would automatically kick in, like daylight savings time, giving me instantaneous publish-ability.

I found this picture of me talking to Larry on Open Book Toronto's Facebook account.

Ongoing investigation

2009-04-03T12:13:00.001-04:00

Larry found some cat puke in the bedroom and saved it to show me. The reason he saved it is because the majority of what was in the puke was fat blue elastic bands. We don’t know which cat it was. Larry thinks it might have been Lilu because she’s more antisocial. She’s weird. And eating blue elastic bands is weird too. I think it might have been Iggy. Because Iggy’s the one I see chewing on elastic bands all the time.

But why just the blue bands? There’s beige elastic bands lying around on the floor all over the place too. They’re the ones that wrap the newspaper. There’s also red ones negligently dispersed about the house. They come from lettuce heads for holding the lettuce leaves in place so the heads are easier to manage when you’re buying them at the grocery store.

One thing we know for sure. Whichever cat it was who puked is the one that favours the colour blue.

Mike's birthday

2009-03-29T14:58:00.004-04:00

We went down to London today for Larry’s brother Michael’s 60th birthday. Michael has nice friends. They’re Londoners.

So am I. I didn’t realize it until now but I think I’ve always been in Londoner denial. Londoners are so conservative, plain, ordinary. Surrounding London is farm land. London is called the forest city. Because it has plenty of trees. What makes London and Londoners so plain and ordinary?

But Michael’s friends are nice. Maybe being a Londoner isn't such a bad way to be.

Last winter Larry’s brother moved from South London to the Pond Mills area.

As a child, Pond Mills held a mystique for me. I think it’s because for some reason all my teachers through grade school were always talking about Pond Mills. They just couldn’t get enough of talking about the particular geological feature of London that was the ponds of Pond Mills.

Readying to get off the 401 we needed to call ahead to get directions because, even though we’d already been there a few times, we still weren’t sure how to get to Mike’s new place.

Eli was on his cell phone calling ahead. He was describing to Michael where we were. He was looking at the street sign and telling Mike we were on Port Mills. I wanted to scream, you idiot, it’s not Port Mills, it’s Pond Mills!

I think only a Londoner would get so upset, even if it was just inside my head, at this minor little word misreading.

Later in the day, near the end of Jacob taking Larry and me on a walk through a swampy forest area with these cute little wooden walking bridges behind Mike’s and the other people in his subdivision’s houses, an elderly lady called to us from the backyard of one of the houses. Because she could see that Larry was tall and she wanted him to help her get a bird that was stuck in her eaves trough out. You’d never believe; this poor bird had its head stuck in her eaves trough. It was a sparrow.

The lady had one of those square shaped clothes lines with the pole in the middle holding it up going neatly into plain white concrete patio. She had noticed the bird when she was taking her laundry down. But there wasn't any evidence of her laundry having ever been there anymore: like a laundry hamper with white bed sheets folded neatly in it. When I was a little girl growing up in London in another subdivision our square shaped clothes line didn’t go into patio concrete. It just went into regular ground with grass growing out of it.

She brought out this kind of a step ladder I’d never seen before that was shorter than a usual step ladder and with a wheel on one side for Larry to use to get at the bird. Maybe you would call it a half step ladder. But once it was set up for climbing on, the wheel part was no longer functional so you didn’t have to worry Larry was going to roll away.

I was holding the ladder steady anyway, Larry on the top step, but just for the regular reason of holding any ladder steady for the person climbing it. Larry was struggling getting the bird’s head out. He would tug on the bird’s body and the bird would make this loud squawking sound that sounded like what the bird meant by it was, please don’t rip my head off my body.

The lady was saying maybe Larry needed a taller ladder and I was saying the same, because with the short step ladder Larry had to reach up to help the bird and maybe if he got higher he could see better how to get the bird out.

She brought out another step ladder, a regular one, that was taller and without the wheel. Both of them were silver metal.

But then Larry got the bird out without needing to switch ladders. It flew away to a bush at the lady’s neighbour’s house next door. Larry said what he realized was that where the roof met the eaves trough wasn’t firm. So he pulled the eaves trough down and pulled the roof up which allowed the bird to get its head out.

Jacob walked over to where the bird had flown to in the bush and it flew away some more. Larry said the softness of the bird’s feathers felt just like fur, like the soft pet fur of our two new pet kittens which surprised him. He didn’t know bird feathers were going to feel like that.

2009-03-26T00:11:00.004-04:00

Some names for Lilu: Goth girl, Cleopatra, the bearded lady, lovely Lilu. Lilu comes when you call her. Iggy comes too when Lilu does. They start sitting on the couch in the living room and race each other to the cat carrier in our bedroom at the back of the house then fight over whose territory it is. Then climb up the cat scratch post to the window sill and to the spot on the top of the box I put the blanket on, on the top of the dresser. They look outside at birds and whatever is out there. They jump down and chase each other around the house more.

Their feet running together sound like horses galloping, very small horses.

They wake us up.

Different kinds of cats

2009-03-06T12:14:00.005-05:00

There's scardy cats, 'fraidy cats; there's hidy cats. Larry says he's been a hidy cat. So have I. When he first got here Iggy was quite the scardy cat. Lilu approached new territory at a pace that better matched her ability to cope with the new environment. Iggy would stalk it, meet it head-on, discover suddenly his fear, then run away.

Iggy is clownish pressing his needs forward then finding himself embarrassed by human lectures about claws and biting. Lilu is discreet, catches on quickly, and hence is even more embarrassed when things, like artificial prey, get away from her. Because of her superiority she has more appearances to keep up than Iggy. More readily she must disguise motives that have been thwarted.

But none of this is quite what Larry meant by being a hidy cat.

Cow kittens

2009-03-04T00:18:00.007-05:00

Iggy, the boy cat is getting big. His fur is very fluffy. Lilu, the girl cat is much smaller. Our old cat Quari was my cat first. Then I moved her in to Larry's before I moved in myself. Quari liked Larry but he never fully warmed up to her.

When Jacob was born Quari would lay across the bed over top of him when he was a sleeping baby. She let him take all the attention away from her. But he never warmed up to her either. I was always Quari's best and first person and was always happy about that.

These kittens move around. Lilu likes to sleep on Jacob's bed. Iggy loves to get on Larry's chest when he watching TV and butt his nose in his face.

Quari used to talk a lot. I talked a lot to her. I talk to these kittens too but they are very quiet. Their voices are small. They make funny trilling sounds sometimes; Iggy more. They gallop through the house together. They play with squeaky toys we got them - a bird, a fish and a mouse.

They like the bathtub plug. They take the plug from the bathtub and leave it in our bed.

Cat behaviour

2009-01-30T10:59:00.005-05:00

We have new adorable kittens. They are black and white both with black masks over their eyes but the boy kitten's mask goes down further making him look sadder and like a Panda bear. He also has round black markings on his shoulders like he's a football player wearing shoulder pads. The girl kitten has a little black beard.

We got them from a cat rescue organization. They were taken from a feral cat colony. They were given to us with a clean bill of health. Prematurely I would say. We have already had a few vet bills getting them back healthy for real.

As the girl kitten's health returns she is turning into something of a hellion. Bad kitty. Yesterday and today I heard her growling at the boy. She growled at us too. When we were feeding her a treat. Then she galloped over our faces when we were sleeping.

Then Larry said he wanted to give her away. This was making me very sad and then I needed him to console me. I don't want to give the girl kitten away. Someone has to help socialize her. Why not us?

I ordered some cat behaviour books from the library. I predict that soon we will be cat behaviour experts.

Snow mountain

2009-01-10T18:58:00.002-05:00

It’s cloudy so you can’t see it’s a full moon tonight. There’s some planes flying in the sky making bright lights against it though.

Last week there were a bunch of snow moving bulldozers of some sort up on the snow hill they make out of snow they take off the streets. When I drive by it again tonight it looks like a snow cliff. There’s a big chunk missing out of it.

Last year the ice mountain, much diminished, was still there in June. It was dark brown. I think because as it melted down the dirt and crud that was in it was getting left behind on top. Little rivulets of water trickled out onto the street beside it; the top of The Allen, proving there was still snow and melt going on inside.

I grow tired of making the edits to my novel. I am ready to take on new territory. I think. The landscape around me doesn’t change.

New Year's

2009-01-01T18:23:00.001-05:00

I bought champagne for New Year’s Eve. I’m not really the champagne type. My friend Berna was. Mostly I wasn’t getting why she liked champagne so much. I didn’t feel bad about it not being for me either.

Naturally I have a theory.

Jacob loved his. He was giggling. He said, I’m drunk, it’s the first time I’ve ever been drunk. Larry timed it to pop the champagne cork right at midnight but he was late by about five seconds. We had Kim Mitchell in Niagara Falls in the background on TV. He said his fingers were so cold he couldn’t move them. Then we saw him putting them in front of a large stand up heater onstage. We switched through all the channels. There were other people in the glasses with the 2 and 9 of 2009 for the Year of the New Year we’re going into on the outside of the glasses frames and the two 0’s on the inside as the frames of the glasses in Times Square in New York City. Jersey Boys doing fifties and eighties stuff at Nathan Phillips Square. George Stroumboulopoulos on CBC for thirty seconds. Pussy Cat dolls we didn’t realize who they were; Larry just thought they were bad singers while I debated that their great bodies and sexy get-ups might compensate for their weak vocals. We told Jacob to brush his teeth and get ready for bed and he said he was going to walk around the long way because there wasn’t much space between the coffee table and the TV and he didn’t trust himself in his inebriated state.

Then Larry and I did some pretty fancy New Year’s kissing on the couch.

Drive in

2008-12-15T13:53:00.003-05:00

Cars were honking at us when I dropped Jacob off in front of the Pizza Pizza today for school. Hurry, I said, there's cars honking at us. A paper was falling out of the car and Jacob grabbed it and put it back in and closed the door. Traffic was bad and I was anxious until I got on the 401. Then I was calm. Even though I was running a few minutes late I wasn't driving in the fast lane. Calm.

The sky was dull grey. The road was dull grey. All at once the street lights running along the highway turned off and it was even more grey.

Winter boots

2008-12-10T22:53:00.001-05:00

I was shopping for winter boots again. I went into Sears because I have a Sears’ card. Their boots were terrible. They looked like they were boots from the Sears’ catalogue forty years ago. Every time I go in the Sears’ store with my Sears’ card I get the impression Sears’ targeted demographic is elderly ladies nostalgic for the days of catalogue shopping.

Then I went into a regular shoe store and asked to try on some boots in size eleven. The lady helping me was very nice I thought. She had at least four different shoe shoppers asking her to bring them shoes. She wasn’t even grouchy about it. She doubted she had an eleven. Sometimes I fit a ten, depending on the make, so I asked her to see if there was a ten. When she came back from looking she was very sorry the biggest size they had was a nine.

I saw other shoe buyers entering the store. With their big winter coats and slow shuffling manner due to the small amount of space in the shoe store made smaller by the large amount of shoe shoppers not to mention the aforementioned cumbersome coats worn by all, they reminded me of moles or at least some dim-sighted winter rodent working its way to its borough. Looking at them I could tell they were all going to be fine. Their inner animal compasses had led them true; they would all be able to fit into size nine or less.

Avoidence strategies

2008-11-21T12:14:00.002-05:00

Larry put some visitor tracking software on my dashboard. I had a visitor from California who googled “while babysitting i did a sexy dance for me brother-in-law.” Sadly, the new software advised that the visitor from California stayed less than ten seconds.

I was going to go to the Y this morning after dropping off Jacob at school but came home and snuggled up in bed with sleeping-in Larry. I fell asleep again too but felt cold the entire time. Nobody likes that feeling.

I have to get back to my novel revision. I’m feeling nervous about it.

I bought new bowls at Ikea and one got broken already. It wasn’t me. I got mad when it happened.

We have a new fridge that sticks out further than the old fridge making it hard to use the microwave in the cupboard above the fridge.

It snowed the night before last.

The astrology website I visit most has a new format because the code for the old format died. Some of the contributors are writing posts about the change sounding very depressed about it.

I better get back to work.

Ella's graveside

2008-11-15T00:42:00.004-05:00

Larry’s uncle Ella died. We got in Larry's brother Mike’s car after the service to head over to the cemetery. We complimented him on his car. I thought he would have had a more relaxed driving style. When we got there Larry's mom Jenny gave me some gloves she had bought for me. They were in the trunk of Mike's car. She was worried they wouldn’t be big enough. She’d even been talking to her friends about whether they’d fit. But they fit. I said for a person my size I don’t have big hands. And she agreed. Which I’ve told her before - but she still acts surprised and almost titillated about it. Actually they fit tight. But there was no way I was going to tell her that.

There was a newly filled in grave beside Ella’s and on the other side a big dirt pile which would be filling in Ella’s grave. It was muddy. Shifra, Ella’s wife, had a Pilipino health care aid holding onto her right side and a daughter-in law holding on to her left. They were also holding umbrellas which weren’t really necessary anymore. It was barely drizzling. A small girl, in bright coloured clothes wandered smiling and cooing around the hole to the grave too. Her mother had hair curled close to her head but hanging down like a variation on a flapper style and was continually squatting down to be at her level and putting her big pretty grown up smiling face in her daughter’s.

I was looking the other way when Shifra slipped and was practically lying flat on her back on the mud of the filled in grave beside Ella’s. Larry said she almost hit her head on the gravestone but made a twisting move and saved herself at the last moment. The daughter-in-law was pulling Shifra back up by the arm like Shifra was a pop up punching bag clown and I was standing right behind them and grabbing the umbrella away from the health care aid so she could use two hands and holding Shifra up from behind saying, gentle, gentle, gentle.

Best Canadian Poetry

2008-11-12T22:01:00.004-05:00

I went.

I went to the celebration of the Best Canadian Poetry 2008. I stood in the back behind the coat rack. I didn’t want to go over and stand beside the bar because it looked too low. Gauging the height of the people leaning against it I determined they were all incredibly short. Another voice in my head was telling me there’s no way the bar and all the people standing at it could be that short. That standing by the bar would not equal me - in an attempt to lean against it - slumping heavily forward, my shoulders and back forming a negative attention drawing exaggerated question mark. It was telling me; here I was going at it again, with my literal delusions of grandeur. And I was listening to it. I was considering the possibility of it. But I still preferred it where I was despite the conceivable refutability of my own logic.

Eventually poets were reading and more people were coming in and it almost looked normal, I was thinking, me standing – not exactly behind – but behind and beside the coat rack. Anyway, I could see everything perfectly well. I could hear it too.

Before that though, before the comfort of feeling it was possible I was blending in, the publisher, Halli Villegas sent a very warm smile in my direction. When she was smiling at me I wasn’t sure who she was but then what she was wearing - a gorgeous red suit jacket and skirt - plus where she was situated – hovering over the books on sale- plus my remembering a picture of her I saw visiting her company’s - Tightrope Books - blog all came together like specially encrypted electronic surveillance data in a Mission Impossible movie. But I didn’t smile back because of all that. I smiled back because what her smile was saying to me was that even though she could see the awkwardness of how I was feeling she could also tell I was secretly like a cat who doesn’t mind, when necessary, holding the position of uncomfortable social dynamics even if I didn’t know it yet myself.

Clock tamborine

2008-11-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

Larry’s brother Mike is too sexy for his body. He’s in his mom’s kitchen in front of me. I’m washing something in the sink and he’s looking at me and doing these dance moves with his mom’s clock he took down off the wall to change the time only the nail that hangs up the clock got stuck inside and its making a rattling sound so the clock is his tambourine and he’s banging it on his hip.

He has nice moves. He’s turning sixty this year and his wife is arranging the party and we’re going to be invited and his moves are way nicer than sixty. They’re nicer than a colostomy bag in his pocket he’s always had since I’ve known him.

He can never buy pants without big pockets for his baggie. Just like his mom never buys short sleeves because of her missing arm.

You can know everything about your brother-in-law and they can know everything about you. It’s the same family. It practically could be them you’re married to. He’s not acting seductive. I don’t think. But his seductive side shows. It’s there to see.

Even when I know that when his wife hit menopause she kept being nice, she kept being practical. She didn’t change. But those qualities then somehow began to add up to leaving him to his own devices which maybe haven’t turned out to be all that much after all.

Waiting for the art walk

2008-11-07T12:26:00.001-05:00

Jacob didn’t finish his French homework so I let him stay home and finish it and took him in late to school. I wanted to get him to school on time because I always take him late on Friday. Because I don’t go into my day job on Fridays. Oh well. I let Jacob pick up a coffee for his teacher. His teacher likes it when the kids bring him coffee. But Jacob got him a latte. “A latte!” I exclaimed.

Larry and I are going on an art walk. It’s really nice out. There won’t be another nice day like this for another half a year probably. I’m waiting for him. I’m writing this on my computer waiting for him. What is taking Larry so long I wonder.

I went to my “the challenge of anger” class for women at the BJCC last night. I liked it. I had a headache that had been coming on all day. When I got home Larry asked me questions of what it was like. It seemed like I wasn’t telling him as much as he wanted to hear. We watched a show on TV. I got in the bath and went to bed with my headache. Now it’s gone. But my back really hurts. There’s two variables that may be why my back is hurting. Doing yoga again in the mornings - maybe I pulled something. I have a new desk cubicle at work - maybe I’m sitting different.

Larry told me he didn’t get to bed until two. Then when I get home from dropping Jake at school he thinks I’m being standoffish when I’m stretching my sore back when he’s coming over for a hug and I tell him his assessment is incorrect and he says nothing.

I picked up some pamphlets at my “challenge of anger” class. This one was showing how when you don’t express your feelings, often, it comes out as anger later.

This one woman in the class said she understands, theoretically in her head, that’s she’s angry. But she can’t feel it. This other woman said she hasn’t felt angry for a long time but now she does and she didn’t expect it and the way she acts when she’s angry reminds her of when she was a teenager. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.

The class leader said because women learn to keep their anger in check, they’re not good at it. She said it’s like learning to drive a car, you need to practice. But when she said “it’s like learning to drive a car,” the woman who couldn’t feel her anger said, oh yeah, I remember that, and described how she was berated for being stupid and every other thing all the way through learning to drive a car by her ex-husband.

I laughed and reached over and touched her lightly on her arm.

Adorability and disability

2008-11-05T23:44:00.001-05:00

I hate my last blog. I don’t mind the story of the ink. It’s just I’m so cloyingly adorable in places. It’s the repeated conditional verb tense.

Sometimes, in my head, I’m all down on Larry when I think he’s being too adorable.

Blech – adorability. But I don’t want to be all bitter either.

I found out through my day job this friend I knew in high school - who I met again a while back at a party at another friend’s place and was being all obsessive about wanting to change her name back to her maiden name which I have always regretted being snide about especially when I found out that subsequently her husband who was in my grade 12 creative writing class and was cute in a way that was brash and innocent at the same time, committed suicide – is on the Canada Pension disability pension.

So her two kids are getting both orphans’ benefits and dependent of a disabled contributor benefits. Seeing her getting that pension when before she was pushing frenetically, the way she always did, to get in as a high school French teacher makes me think she must not have recovered from what he did. But I never knew her. Each time I knew her she was a friend of a friend.

She was nervous and fragile in high school anyway. You’d come back from summer vacation and suddenly she’d have switched into a new identity. One of her older brothers played saxophone in different jazz bands. He had a reputation of extreme attractiveness to women. Which was way too far away from me for me to see. He had brown curly hair.

She is going by her maiden name again.

Larry's ink

2008-11-02T18:26:00.001-05:00

Larry was tired and he spilled his ink on the living room floor. It’s okay. He cleaned it up. We have a hard wood floor that needs to be refinished anyway. Then he was in bed already and I was in the bathroom and his ink bottle had gotten in there. I don’t know how. It doesn’t make sense his ink bottle being in there. The living room is different because Larry is always listening to movies while he’s working in there and his art supplies are spread all around.

The ink bottle in the bathroom was on its side and spilling. Don’t worry, I said, I’m just going to put some tissue on it and you can clean it up in the morning. The good thing is our bathroom counter is black already, the colour of Larry’s ink. So if we had some alien house inspectors come in during the night they wouldn’t even be able to tell. Then Larry almost didn’t clean it up in the morning because he had forgotten about it and couldn’t tell it was there.

There’s always scrap pieces of paper around with little ink painted squiggle lines painted on them. That’s proof of Larry getting the tip of his brush smooth just the way he likes it. It’s no good painting with ink when there’s blobby bits on your brush. Your work would end up with blobs in it.

Recently he spilled ink on the remote that plays the movies. Now we can’t rewind our movies back, like ten seconds to hear someone say something over again we missed the first time. Larry tried to empty the ink out of the remote, to dry it out completely, but it still wouldn’t work after he did that. We didn’t get a new one yet either because it would cost eighty dollars to get that kind of remote back again. Doesn’t that seem awfully expensive? What we do is use one of our other remotes to move us back to the start of the scene we’re in. That’s a big hassle though because we have to watch the whole scene over again just to hear one little word we missed.

Halloween

2008-10-31T12:43:00.000-04:00

I boiled some eggs for breakfast. I used Larry’s “get the water boiling then put the eggs in for four and a half to five minutes” technique. It gets the eggs to the perfect softness. The problem I’m having is when I put the eggs in the boiling water gently with a big spoon to assist in the gentleness, one of the eggs always ends up cracking and spewing out its innards which froths up the water and reduces the amount of egg in the affected egg.

Larry’s watching this film called Babysitters while he draws which looks sexy about babysitters having sexual relationships with the husbands of couples they babysit for. I criticized it for being about relationships of younger women with older men. Larry has a problem because he can’t watch action or comedic or subtitled films when he’s drawing. They’re too visual. Because, ironically, he doesn’t actually watch the films that much, he listens to them. It wasn’t fair of me to criticize it just because of the older man, younger woman thing. But I did anyway. Then I joined him and watched it for a bit and it wasn’t bad.

Eli came home extremely drunk in the middle of the night. He knocked on the side door, waking us up then collapsed on the stairs that lead up to the main floor. He was crying. He was talking incomprehensibly about being treated wrongly. About being beaten on. I don’t think it was that bad. Larry was talking to him and even helping examine him and making sure.

Larry was helping him so much this week with emotional problems he has. Making sure he got to see his therapist. I don’t know why he had to go and get drunk. But I’m not completely ungenerous. I told Larry that maybe it’s just that the only way Eli used to know how to cope with his problematic feelings was by getting drunk. Now he’s doing better so maybe the getting drunk thing is just an old habit. Wasn’t that sweet of me to think that?

Eli had black mascara on because it was a Halloween party. A girl he liked had made him up. But we don’t know what happened to that girl from his story. There were these guys he shared a tab with and it was about eighty dollars and they took off. But he was the responsible one and stayed and didn’t run away. Also he was helping sort out a fight that had happened earlier. So if he was the responsible one and not running away why should he have to pay the full tab? That wasn’t fair. He just wanted to pay his part. And it wasn’t right either that he was picked up by security in the first place. He was the one helping out and being responsible. What was the most upsetting thing – the bad treatment - I think was they wouldn’t let him go.

Eli couldn’t answer Larry how he got home. Maybe because in his head, he was still out there. He could answer. But his answer kept starting at when he was helping out with the fight and then winding somewhere other than answering Larry’s question.

He was going to take responsibility for the $4,000 lambskin jacket that he didn’t come home with that Bubbie had got with him a little while ago in the morning. Eli looked down at his arms which were only partly covered with a short sleeved shirt on and brought up losing it. But I don’t think they really paid $4,000 for it. There’s no way Bubbie would get Eli a $4,000 lambskin jacket unless it cost a lot less than that.

Includes incomprehensible astrological terminology

2008-10-28T22:08:00.001-04:00

Larry stayed up late talking to Eli. Then he got up with me to go into work with me so he could have the car so he could take Eli to his therapy. He was doing a lot for Eli and for me too.

Larry asked me to drive because he was tired. Then he didn’t like the way I was driving. I was mad at him. I was in a bad mood when I got into work because he was angry at me too. I was also feeling groggy and spaced out. Usually I eat some breakfast at my desk but I forgot to. Then I remembered and ate some. Eventually I told some of my female co-workers about Larry criticizing my driving and they all said their husbands did the same thing. One of them waved her hand in the air, like in dismissal of the whole male act of criticizing female driving.

I felt a little better.

Since Jacob’s away I wanted to meet Larry downtown for a coffee before his etching class. But Larry said he wanted to take a nap before he went out. I called him back a little while later. He wasn’t napping. He talked to me in a growly mad bear voice but I was able to convince him to come down and meet me. I told him it would be nice and I would smile.

There’s a new moon in Scorpio tonight. It’s right on my draconic Venus. And close to Larry’s natal Mars-Saturn conjunction. I was trying to get Larry to enact some astro-drama with me on this point. We were walking down the long wooden-floor hallway of the art building where he takes his etching class. He’s not as good at me at thinking astrologically and has to remind me to not be so inconsiderate and talk so fast. Plus the proximity to his imminent class was making it even more difficult for him to entertain my extreme astrology. He engaged enough to tell me I was crazy which actually fits the symbolism so I complimented him for it.

I walked along Queen Street to get to the University subway line to go home. There were a lot of shoe stores along the way. I was looking in their windows at the winter boot styles. Fall Out Boy was playing outside at City TV. I stopped and listened for a couple of songs. The performance was for the TV audience. They played a song then left the stage for five minutes or so and then came back to play another song. How they related to us - the background audience of their TV performance - reminded me of being a kid and performing to a mirror that I could be completely fake to but that still saw only the amazingest parts of me.

Then I was thinking of Marshall McLuhan and of how his first and last name begin with the same letter, the letter “m,” and of how even though “m” starts the very fitting - for him - words, “media” and “message” and “meaning” and “matter,” you would still think someone like him would have had a name starting with cooler and more cerebral letters like “s” or “e” or possibly “t.”

Mysterious

2008-10-26T17:57:00.000-04:00

The first time I went to the women’s toilet at Starbuck’s today I found many droplets of pee spray all over the back part of the seat. It looked like whoever had done it had had a very full bladder. It looked like it couldn’t, for example, be a situation of someone deciding to just try one more time on their way out, in case there’s something there; one of those “planning for the future”, preventative pees. Such a pee would have left far less prolific results.

I was cleaning it up with a few different pieces of toilet paper for my turn thinking it looked like it had been fun for the person who did it, spraying the seat like that. In a way it made me happy for them. Then I was thinking the person who had done it might have been someone who is afraid to sit on toilet seats and maybe the whole experience of standing or half-squatting over the toilet may not have been fun for them at all. Maybe in the tortured process of part-squatting the person got a strain in their thigh or their calf muscle and their entire leg was shaking in a spasm as they were making their pee.

The next time I wanted to the bathroom to pee I had to wait a while. Evidently a lot of other people had to go too. Which does make sense for a coffee shop. This time, when it finally got to my turn the toilet seat was up. It wasn’t down in the sitting position. It was up.

I have to say I find what goes on in the women’s toilet at the Starbucks so mysterious.

Automatic reboot

2008-10-25T14:53:00.001-04:00

Larry made us some Smoothies for breakfast. Now I’m cold. Smoothies don’t suit this time of year. That is what I have to say about Smoothies. Brrrr.

I finally started working on some revision work for my novel. It’s been hard to get at because I just can’t seem to convince myself that the revisions I have in mind could possibly be enough. I just can’t seem to let go of the idea that what everyone in the world wants from me including, naturally, the interested editor at Coach House, is ruinous killing compromises of the soul. I think that surely it can’t be until I’m feeling that way that the revisions I’m doing could be enough.

Anyway I got through it enough, started working on it, was feeling good, but.

But my computer sometimes likes to reboot itself in the middle of the night. And I didn’t save it. Sometimes it can go for weeks and not reboot. Sometimes it likes to do it a couple of days in a row. I didn’t save it because I hadn’t quite decided what to save it under, what kind of file it should go in. I was enjoying waiting on that decision coming to me. I also didn’t realize that it would be lost if my computer decided to reboot itself in the middle of the night.

My old computer would never do that. Sure it might crash on occasion. My new computer acts like an inconsiderate bully sometimes. It’s so imperious. It’s very rude. It thinks it knows everything.

When I found out my work was gone and had looked everywhere on the computer I thought it could be I asked Larry if he could help me find it. He explained to me It was too late and he couldn’t help me. I should have saved it.

I’m sure it’s going to be okay. It’s not like I wrote that much. It just would have been nicer if it didn’t happen. I would feel a lot better now about it if it didn’t happen.

Leaders and followers

2008-10-24T17:30:00.000-04:00

I just updated the template of my blog. I didn’t change how it looked actually. But people following my blog can now add their name to my follower’s list. Since sheep are such good followers I might get some sheep signing up too.

Like who wants to admit to being a follower?

Eli, my stepson, went to leadership training camp this summer with the reserves. He was in this class of like a hundred young men all training to be leaders. Now when we’re out, the family, in the car, say, and a situation comes up that requires some hot and fast decision making Eli starts telling all of us what to do. He’s twenty-five. He’s excitable. What does he know?

Sometimes in these situations he reminds us of the power he now possesses of leadership trying to convince us his inexperienced twenty-five year old ass is the one we should be following.

Also, this summer, Larry coached Jacob’s baseball team. He had this co-coach who ran a lucrative printing business but who knew squat about baseball. He looked like Jeff Bridges but with darker hair and eyes which when I told him he already knew about. But whenever Larry would be coaching the kids the co-coach would be talking in this loud parallel voice at the same time sometimes saying similar things and sometimes saying completely opposite things that made no sense if you knew baseball.

I don’t think he ever asked Larry’s opinion or advice. He just always acted like he knew everything already. He was a very good recycler though. He knew which products went in which recycling receptacles at the ball parks. I have to concede that.

It made me wonder how he ran his business because isn’t one of the key attributes of being a business manager recognizing who is an authority on what and then using that to your advantage. And then aren’t you supposed to get rich from it and then be secretly laughing under your breath that the smart people whose knowledge you’re managing to your advantage don’t get to enjoy as many vacations as you or to renovate their kitchen with stainless steel chrome appliances as often?

When Eli returned from leadership training camp he looked like he’d had the crap kicked out of him. Which may very well have been the case. If too many chefs spoil the stew, wouldn’t too many military leadership candidates ruin their shoes? (bit of a rhyme there)

By the final and deciding game of the first round of the playoffs the tension between the two co-coaches came to a head. It was the third out of five innings. The team was down four runs. The Jeff Bridges look alike insisted on a pitching change that would put his son, who had struggled all season to throw strikes, on the mound. Larry questioned his autocratic approach. Jeff Bridge’s temper refused to answer. Larry, in an attempt to manage his piqued temper, removed himself from the game collapsing on a folding chair on the sidelines between Jeff Bridge’s wife and myself.

The chair was actually one of theirs’ and was broken. The back support part wasn’t attached properly so Larry’s back was falling out of the back of the chair and he was turning around to check it out when Jeff Bridge’s wife began reprimanding him for not being a team player and not knowing how to make compromises. I was so sure when she was talking to Larry like that that it must be the same way she talked to her husband all the time.

I thought there must be some really weird kind of déjà vu going on for her with Larry being in the position she must usually find herself in with her husband and her –by virtue of the fact she was lecturing Larry for it - being in the position her husband must usually be in, but her saying the words to Larry that she would usually say from her regular position to her husband.

Sudafed high

2008-10-19T17:10:00.004-04:00

Larry’s sick with a cold. We were invited to Sukkot dinner at Leon’s for the second year. Leon was an accountant. Several years ago Larry’s mother got him to help us with a loan. But he doesn’t do that anymore. Now he’s a partner in a door business. Except he still does some accounting work for Jenny, Larry’s mother. Also Larry played hockey at a pick up hockey game Leon was running on Sunday nights for a while. Then Larry made waves by standing up to some of the bad actors at Leon’s game.

Larry took a Sudafed. Even though we got there late we were still sitting on a cushy sofa waiting for the last couple to show up. Leon’s wife, Denise was upstairs getting dressed or something still. It was the same couple who was there last year. The husband was a real estate agent and an expert on the Beatles. The wife was Australian. The ten year old daughter had hair so blonde it was practically white. The twelve year old son was going to be a lawyer one day. He was game and they’d all been working on that eventuality together pretty much since he was born.

Larry made jokes to Leon about telling his mother beforehand he was sick and uncertain he should attend the function and her insistent response that he still had several hours to make himself better so get to work already.

Jenny looked regal. She had her hair done up and her eyebrows shaped up too. She sat in an upright position on the sofa in a cream dress with a stylish fifties look to it, as we listened to Denise’s nephew describe in a sharp yet commanding voice a lot of details about the rural high school he teaches at. He was very short and had big blue eyes.

Leon's is a house with mezuzahs, which are religious parchments put inside sometimes fancy containers, at probably every doorway not just entering, as prescribed by Jewish law, but inside the house too. I could see the one at the entrance of the room we were in and got the impression from my vantage point at its far end that it had pink flowers on it.

I thought about getting a word in edgewise but as hard as I thought it didn't come to me what that word would be. The sofa I was sitting and listening on was so soft I was afraid I might sink into its cushioned layers like a firefly into a molten marshmallow.

Yom Kippur blog

2008-10-10T10:52:00.002-04:00

For Yom Kippur the dishwasher stopped working. Very observant of it. It’s plugged up, apparently. Larry and I kept partly scooping out the water left in the bottom of it and then running the dishwasher over again in hopes of flushing it out.

Larry did more than that too. But I don’t want to talk about it.

The dishwasher kept not working. It would stop part way through its cycle; some internal sensors sensing too much water collected in its bottom, saving us the disaster of dishwasher flooding.

I cleaned out the foyer. I emptied the closet of hockey sticks, gym bags, tennis rackets, roller blades. I found this kid’s microscope Larry bought for Jacob when he was like four that didn’t work, that we never returned. I scrubbed the floor and the wall trimming with Pine sol.

Classically Jewish people go to synagogue on Yom Kippur. They dress up. They don’t wear leather. For some reason I can’t think of now it’s not religious to be wearing dead animal skins. The public phones are turned off at the synagogue. This is another example of observing the “don’t work” principle of Yom Kippur.

But really everyone observes Yom Kippur their own way. And they have cell phones.

I was reading some yoga magazines lately that were talking all about how in the yogic tradition it’s through service and work that you get in touch with your spiritual side. That’s the approach I was employing by cleaning up the foyer. Honestly. Besides when else would I allow myself to do such a thorough cleaning job without feeling guilty about it? I really do have other things to do that I usually consider much more important. Like manifesting a writing career.

My mother in law called part way through the day. She was sick. She’d never been sick in her life before on Yom Kippur she told me. The sickness came on her the night before, first as a chill, when she was at synagogue for Kol Nidre, when we weren’t there with her.

Larry was out when she called. He had to pick up his MasterCard that he accidently left behind when he was at an art fair he went to on Monday and was buying a subscription to the Canadian art magazine cmagazine. Leaving the card behind was working out for him though because it was giving him the opportunity to go back and talk some more to the nice woman he bought the subscription from who is nice and savvy about today’s Toronto art scene.

I kept trying to get him not to go because it didn’t fit in with my idea of how to approach Yom Kippur. For one thing it’s not practical driving downtown when you’re fasting. It expends unnecessary energy.

The day before, when Larry’s mom was calling Larry working at home then me during my break at work, trying to get us to go to synagogue with her for Kol Nidre, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Neither was it what Larry wanted to do. I wanted to do some cooking during the evening to get stuff ready for breaking the fast the next day even if technically I should have already done that before sunset.

Jewish New Year’s is all about the symbolism. How things go, the decisions you make, is you symbolically setting up how you want your year to go. Do you really want another year of your mother in law guilting and dominating your life because you keep letting her perceptions of how pathetic a Jew you are win the day?

When Larry got home and I told him about his mother being sick, he immediately felt guilty, that it was his actions of not going to Kol Nidre with her that had somehow caused his mother’s illness. Funny, I said to him, it’s the first thing I thought of too.

Sunday Starbucks

2008-10-06T00:42:00.002-04:00

Jacob has a mole over top of his top lip. It’s on the right side. It’s a beauty mark is what I tell him. He’s always had it. He’s worried that it’s going to grow too big.

The last few weekends Larry and I go for a walk over to Starbucks, Jacob stays home and does some homework, we drink our Venti Soya Carmel or Pumpkin Spice Lattes, Larry draws people in the Starbucks, I read Larry interesting stories from the New York Times Magazine over the jazz music that Larry can’t hear entirely or can’t focus on completely, perhaps because he’s concentrating on drawing, then Jacob calls and says he’s done his homework and one of us convinces him to do some more and then he calls again and we get him to read to us some of what he’s done and then we let him ride his bike over to Starbucks and join us.

Jacob gets a cold hot chocolate or a regular one or asks for this other chocolate drink that is so sugary and decadent we usually say no. He gets a pastry. We get him to buy us another Venti Soy Latte of another flavour to share between us but this one decaffeinated.

Today Larry and I got the purple cushy chairs. They’re the only soft chairs at our Starbucks. Jacob’s mostly too old to sit on my lap or anything like that anymore. But today he asked to squeeze in beside my on my purple cushy chair. Funny, when he asked I realized I was wishing it too. We jostled a bit before we figured out a way to get him in. I put my right arm around his shoulders and neck and patted it on his chest.

Spirographs

2008-09-23T10:36:00.006-04:00

All the ladies are wearing black skirts with floral patterns on them. It's been like that for the past two days. The one walking up the stairs in front of me today had an abstract motif. It was in purples and whites and the edges were hard not round like regular flowers. Its pattern was like the result of an especially odd wheel you picked out then drew from spirograph.

Something sweet got spilled on the government courtyard walk near where I eat my lunch. Numerous bees were walking around in circles licking it up with their bee appendages. Don't bees clumped together in a bunch seem cuddly? But you know better. You're hearing a buzzing sound even if you're too far away for the sound to actually be reaching your ears.

It's bright out still. September. But if I want to get up in the morning for a walk before work, it's too dark. Besides, it's better I should pay attention to the news for a change, isn't it? Jacob's friend's dad was in it. He was the guy who when the truck that crashed into the sleeping lady's bedroom of the condos by the 401 came down from his unit to find his neighbours in a state of shock.

I saw a monarch butterfly. I saw a yellow butterfly. One time when Larry and I were arguing and I was in the kitchen and he was in the living room I saw a black and white woodpecker with red on its crown in the lilac bush outside the window and I wanted to tell him but if I moved or called to him I would scare it away so I didn't even though we were arguing and I wanted to so much so there would be something nice and sweet between us. I kept looking at it, its beak nudging into the lilac branches and it kept staying. It didn't leave for a very long time; maybe a minute or two.

Weeding

2008-09-13T12:23:00.003-04:00

I weeded the back garden yesterday. The good thing about weeding at this time of year is the weeds are weakening. They don’t grip the earth in the same kind of life or death way. Most of them come out pretty easy. It’s a good excuse for having not weeded earlier.

I think one of the reasons the weeds are feeling this way is because their heads are in full blossom. The force of their life is in their seed. But what I did was squeeze the weed heads between my fingers so the seed pods or fluffs couldn’t scatter all over and sink into the soil and seed new weeds. Ha ha, I thought, to the weeds, as I placed their seed in paper garden bags, I have outsmarted you.

My hair dresser told me I should wear my hair so this bang section sweeps across my face from the left side over to the right. Before I just pulled it straight back. It looks really nice. It looks sophisticated. Except it means the bang hair tends to fall into my face sometimes covering my right eye. This feels nice too, like I’m an unkempt street urchin who doesn’t miss a trick and with a smart mouth to go along.

Except when I’m gardening. Would the damn hair get off my face already? I have to keep brushing it back plus my hands are covered in dirt from gardening and the dirt is getting all in my hair and my face repeatedly.

To deal with that, I went and got this hair clip I bought like three months ago that’s been sitting in the bottom of my purse and now has something all sticky on it. I don’t know what it is. It has the consistency of tree sap only there’s no way that’s what it is. I certainly haven’t been near tree sap over the past few months. It's been a very long time since I've been out in the garden.

So after a while some of the hairs started falling out of the clip so I had to take the clip off in order to get them back in only I couldn’t because the sticky stuff on the clip was sticking to my hair and it hurt too much to take it off. I sat down under the red maple in a lawn chair and eased it out. It wasn’t that bad.

The wind was blowing through the leaves of the red maple and it was making rustling sounds. There were just a few leaves on the ground from its leaves beginning to fall. There was nothing beautiful or exciting about these leaves because the leaves of red maples don’t change colour in the fall.

I had to get something hard and skinny to dig in the cracks of the hair clip to get the sticky stuff out but couldn’t see anything useful. The tree rustled some more and I decided to try one of the stems of one of its leaves. I pulled one off the tree. It worked okay. I got some of the sticky stuff out. But the leaf stem was still too supple from being so recently alive. Then I looked down on the ground and there was an old thin hard twig that finished the job off perfectly.

I went to pick up Jacob from school then to get some wine. I was looking for this one particular South Australian wine Larry and I got last time but couldn’t see it. Jacob was pulling this special plastic basket that you put your wine in with wheels on it like the kind of rolling-on-wheels suitcases people pull behind them in airports. He kept rolling it around under my feet and complaining I wasn't asking for help when I was enjoying just looking on my own.

Then I went to ask for help and he said, finally. We sampled some wines from the Asass region in France which is near the German border and which used to keep switching back and forth between being part of France then part of Germany. Only Jacob was embarrassed I was getting him to sample the wine too because he’s only twelve and doesn’t like breaking rules. So I told him to have some crackers and cheese which were also part of what was being offered for sampling along with the wine.

The lady demonstrating the wine acted like there was something she knew that was maybe about us that she wasn’t telling. She was elderly. I tried not to look at her face too closely because if I did I would notice how deep her wrinkles were and she might see my noticing them in my eyes and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. So she had the power. Which I think is what made her look like she had a secret she swallowed that was still stuck in her throat and that might jump out any second if she wasn’t careful.

Our new driveway

2008-09-05T00:35:00.001-04:00

Workmen leave things behind. As far as I know the first crew that came out, the crew that dug up the driveway readying it for repaving didn’t leave anything. It was a while ago, at the beginning of the summer. Weeds grew in it, among the stones, while we waited for the city to fix the curb first.

First a guy came by with a drill device and legs to hold his truck study while the drill drilled to drill open the curb so the next group of city guys could drag away the old chunks of cement the next day. They’re the ones that left a pair of gloves on Helen and Oscar’s lawn, our next door neighbours. Helen is very critical of our ability to maintain our property to her standards so the moment we saw what they’d done, leave gloves on her lawn, we quickly removed them. These guys also left a bunch of boards covering the newly dug out section at our driveway’s entrance presumably so no one would fall down inside it, hurt themselves and sue the city for damages.

The city’s sidewalk pouring guys came next. After them the city crew to fill in the road pavement section. They removed the boards that were covering the hole that used to be there before it got paved again and left them in front of Helen and Oscar’s house.

Then the guys we hired to pave the driveway came and paved the driveway and they left behind a rake with black tar on its rake prongs. It’s leaning against the basketball stand.

Perhaps the city guys who did the road part paved after the guys we hired to pave the driveway. I can’t remember which was first.

No one’s come back to get the gloves. No one’s come back to get the rake. No one’s come back to take away the long boards and the short ones still sitting on the road in front of Helen and Oscar’s.

Larry and I are both getting worried about how the boards on the street in front of her house must be making Helen feel. Helen and Oscar are one of the original owners still living on the street. Their across the street neighbours, and ours, who have also lived on the street since the beginning told Larry about all the nice people on the street but Helen wasn’t included. They told Larry she was in an entirely different category. Oscar wasn’t included on the nice list either by virtue of his being with Helen.

Helen goes out everyday in a windbreaker or a winter coat or a coat in between those two, dressed two degrees more protectively than everyone else, always in sunglasses and a suitably protective hat, for a walk for her health. Usually around ten in the morning. When we first moved in she told us that things had been touch and go for her for a while. She had been seeing doctors. Strict adherence to a walking regimen was one of the measures that was going to keep her alive. Then she got used to who we were and the only words she had for us were criticism.

Critical lines

2008-09-01T15:23:00.002-04:00

Larry and I stayed up super late watching the final episode of The Wire, Season 5. I felt guilty. Larry’s always talking about getting to sleep at a good time. And since he’s identified it as a problem he has, getting to sleep at a good time, then what I do is think that my new job as his most ideal and supportive spouse is to suddenly, automatically and devotedly, instantaneously be good at helping him with his problem and never have the same one myself.

McNulty went crazy in season 5. A homicide detective for the Baltimore police department, McNulty staged dead bodies he’d found, during the course of his work day to make it look like there was a serial killer was on the loose so that he could siphon monies allotted to the new fake serial killer investigation to an older actual drug and murder investigation for which funds had been cut.

Talking about it this morning, Larry still felt higher ups in the department should have showed more sympathy to McNulty’s situation. I didn’t really think so. I thought McNulty had crossed a critical line. Although if Larry had been all hard about it and said McNulty deserved everything he got, I probably would have been arguing for more leniency too.

Larry says some friends are just too much work. I know this could be me making Larry sound bad but, isn’t it true? Why work so super hard at maintaining friendships in which the supposed friend doesn’t really get or value you the way you need a friend to? What is the point of that? Isn’t that just politics, really? Which there’s nothing wrong with. Which has its value too. But shouldn’t you know the difference?

I’ve had this sample of perfume on my desk sitting under my monitor for a long time. For months. I just put some on. It is so stinky. I think I’m going to wash it off or at least try to wash it off. I hope it washes off. If it doesn’t wash off, I hope it partly washes off. It’s very strong. It smells like baby powder and burnt tire rubber with a touch of skunk thrown in.

I’m doing laundry for Jacob’s first day back to school tomorrow. There’s some kind of leak going on in the laundry room. The floor near the washing machine is wet. There’s beads of water coming up between the seams of the tiles of the recently replaced laundry room floor. It’s not a lot of water. It could be nothing. Jacob was messing around in the laundry tubs yesterday. Maybe it has to do with something he did then. I wish we still had the old wrecked floor down there. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about figuring out the solution to the leaking water issue so much.

Jacob is at a friend’s house. It’s really gorgeous out. I changed the calendars. It’s September.

Olympic update

2008-08-24T01:53:00.001-04:00

I am so tired. I am tired of watching the Olympics. I’m also tired of being sick. I’ve been sick since we came back from NYC. First a fever then the ear ache, now the ringing ear with the vinegar feeling in the throat causing all the coughing which I try to keep light so it doesn’t hurt but sometimes it goes deeper and the coughs rips into the pain at the bottom of my throat that I can mostly ignore otherwise and then it rips into the pain in my ears.

The nice part of being sick is getting to hold onto my personal perspective better. I’m always so way out there in everyone else. I’m always lost. Out there.

I don’t want to get better. That’s bad. I know. But it’s a thought. Worth thinking. I bet it’s a thought that happens to a lot people who then can’t think of anything better and then can’t find their way back to better.

Larry and I cry at all the sobby Olympian stories. We check each other out for amount of tears to measure how much we have been moved. Sometimes I can’t even talk. That’s how moved I am. So I would get the gold medal between us of strongest emotional response. I liked the one about the taekwondo girl with the pretty eyes and long neck who Larry said looked like Angelina Jolie and her coach father also with a nicely shaped face and long neck and how close they were in their preparation and how when he was the coach, he was just the coach, not her father. And then later on they were out getting a coffee together - although maybe she was getting something else because should an athlete really be having a coffee? – and then he was just her father and they were so close and she was telling him everything.

I wish that was my father.

Although I’ll admit there was a small cynical part of me thinking there had to be something they weren’t talking about because could their relationship really be that good? But I don’t really like that cynical part. Sometimes it’s so mean spirited. Not only that, sometimes it’s completely totally stupidly wrong. So then, at least in those cases, I would really like to know, what is the point of having that cynical perspective?

The juice of the now

2008-08-20T15:04:00.001-04:00

I should have been taking notes in NYC.

I started reading a book by Canadian writer Katherine Govier. Reading it is part of a self-education program mostly involving reading Canadian female novelists. I’m finding the particular novel I picked up, The Truth Teller, so tedious.

I loved David McFadden’s family oriented Trips around Lake Erie and Lake Huron but couldn’t relate to his later writer with film crew as rock star Trip around Lake Ontario. I gave the volume of the works as a gift at a wedding at which the bride and groom requested books for their gifts. I read Huron and Erie to my son last year when he was eleven and he loved them too.

Of course some of the jokes went over his head. Of course many of them still go over mine. Surely my not appreciating Ontario has all to do with my lack of sophistication.

I like how McFadden often portrays his wife as callous or bumpkin like and the fall guy. I love doing that when I write about my husband. But he hates it. It used to be it’s the problem of my lack of romantic-ness all over again. Now, it’s he’s waiting for me to become aware of my gentler sentiments toward him.

Nevertheless, sometimes he’s all paranoid and thinks I’m doing it when I’m not. Other times I’m doing it and he doesn’t realize. I think perhaps I may have outfoxed him. Or maybe he’s just not letting on, he knows. It’s a very delicate situation. And ironic.

I should have taken notes when I was in NYC.

I think there’s a place in David McFadden’s earlier Trips in which he’s writing about writing about writing notes. Was that one too many “writings”? The point is clearly he was writing notes along the way. Which is what I should have been doing.

For a while there I think I may have been losing myself in NYC. Jacob got sick right way. He had a fever. He was sleeping. He didn’t want us to leave him alone. We were thinking of killing him. I was. Larry left his bag at home on the bed and we had to buy him some new clothes. It was hot and sunny and I was wearing pants and a black shirt that was attracting too much sun to it, making me hotter. I needed to get back to the hotel room and change into some shorts and a lighter coloured shirt. Or get in the shade.

The pond in Central Park had all these turtles in it. They were sticking their heads out and looking at us where we were sitting in a Pagoda talking to a woman from Brussels. She was small and critical of American eating habits, their love of over-sized portions, their huge muffins. We were eating this amazing Spanish goat’s cheese on crackers that we got from Zabar’s, a tour book featured deli on the Upper West side. And some deli salads. We shared some with her and after two helpings, the correct amount of time to accept food offered by strangers, she had enough. I couldn’t stop eating the cheese and neither could Larry. It was so tasty. She brought up American eating habits again which started making me uncomfortable thinking maybe she was secretly trying to comment on ours.

Belgium is separating maybe and was without a government for six months recently. She quit her job as a personal assistant and is going to do something new, like take a course of study, when she returns from her trip. Her friends in America wouldn’t talk about their political beliefs over the phone with her when she was in Brussels. They were afraid. Her Canadian friend in Brussels didn’t feel comfortable expressing his opinions when he lived in Canada.

She had a problem with her leg which is why she had signed on to take tour busses around the city for the past few days. She had a wet hand shake when she got up to leave. It made me think she was sick.

Do you think Katherine Govier found writing The Truth Teller tedious? Personally, I don’t like writing when I’m finding the writing tedious. I stop. I am so bored. I don’t like recounting tales either. The energy of the story gets all big and large and sweeping and conventional and tedious. Whereas by taking notes the same day it’s easier for you to find your way right back into what was the juice of the now.

Although: it’s not completely impossible to remember these things too.

Home

2008-08-17T14:52:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we drove home. First Larry and I went for a walk to the health food store at 54^th and 7^th. On the way we picked up some fruits and vegetables at an open farmer’s market at 58^th and 8^th that wasn’t there before. It must have been because it was Saturday. It was sunny and clear, the depth of the blueness of the sky emphasized from looking up at it against the shadow side of buildings. We woke Jacob up to tell him what we were doing but only with a whisper in hopes that he would be able to fall back asleep if he felt like it.

Larry and I oohed at restaurants and architectures we hadn’t noticed yet. We were seeing them again more like how we had on the first day we went out together, just us, when Jacob was sick and we had to leave him back at the hotel room.

One of the things we got at the health food store was granola. Jacob likes granola so I thought it would be nice for him, like a souvenir, to bring him home some NYC granola. Plus it looked really good.

It is good. Now we’re home I poured him a bowl and ate a few bits of it myself, then decided to have some for breakfast too even though I don’t usually eat granola because it’s too heavy on my stomach. Neither does Larry but he agreed to join in on the granola fest.

Our house seems really cute, like a doll house, because it’s a single house with a space between it and the next one and not never-ending tall buildings attached one to another I can’t believe have been there like that so long without me. One day we estimated we walked 90 blocks, Jacob too. Our feet were so sore. When we got back home to the hotel room, we took turns massaging each other’s feet with peppermint foot cream we’d brought with us.

Eating granola in front of the TV but not watching it, Larry telling me how depressed he’s feeling now he’s back, Jacob showing Eli his new electric guitar he bought on the lower east side and practiced learning on all the way home in the car, I’m imagining walking city block after city block of tall buildings making different jagged sky pictures and not knowing where to go to get it because all there is outside right now is the quietness of the summer and cicadas and no car honking sounds echoing off of building walls. There’s just curly streets that don’t go anywhere big, maybe to the ravine by the Jewish Y where Eli and Jacob found the snake that time on the rocks.

Jenny, Larry’s mom keeps calling his cell phone. It turns out she wants us all for dinner tonight up at her place in Thornhill. What do you want to do? - Larry says to me - voice neutral, as if her request isn’t just adding insult to injury.

No

2008-08-07T13:18:00.002-04:00

My dad always said no. For a while there when my sister and I were young, my dad would take us downtown to the market building on Saturday mornings. Things the market building had that regular grocery stores didn’t were brown eggs. Also special thick white honey in big tins with tin lids, which when you wanted to eat some, you had to pry off with a knife unless the person who used it before you didn’t put it back on all the way.

Can we have a donut dad from the donut store? No. Can we have a cookie from the bakery? No. Can we have a kitten from the pet store? These kittens are the most adorable ever. No.

The only time I could get him to say yes was when we went together to a regular grocery store. Not every time, because that wouldn’t be realistic, but as seemed fit, I’d start coughing part way through our shopping. Not crazy, heavy hacking because, again, how realistic would that be? Just subtly, conveying in the portrait of my cough that maybe what he’d been too distracted to notice is that I’d actually been having the coughing problem for a few days already.

Then when we got to the checkout I’d make my move. Dad? I have a bit of a sore throat. Do you think you could buy me some cough drops?

Ludens; not Vicks because Ludens were round capsule shaped not pointy triangles so softer feeling in your mouth. They were bigger too, super lemony and less mentholated-tasting.

I bought a new camera yesterday. The guy selling it to me recommended a Fuji because of their great warrantee. I’m buying it for our trip to New York City next week. It’s pink which I’m okay with. Although, upon sharing my neutral response to the pink with the salesman, I think culturally speaking, he may have felt badly for me that I didn’t know enough to be moved more.

I would say he was gay. Big open blue eyes with no hidden corners, gossipy; he got a better price for his hotel when he went to NYC through Priceline than we did through Hotwire. The deals he got were always the best and most savvy even under the most trying but also interesting of circumstance but meant conspiratorially not to compete. None of the embarrassed, eye lowering, problematic tug of our sexes between us I usually get with men, and even more especially with the incorrigibly young and their high testosterone that won’t forgive them for backing down from it.

Larry’s not working right now. I mean he’s not working at a job that makes money. He is working. He is working on his art like he never has before. It would be wiser to spend none of it, to sit on the money from my father’s inheritance.

I don’t feel like spending it is a way of making up for all my father’s “no’s” along the way. They were easy. They were predictable. I didn’t mind them. I didn’t feel unloved.

Larry booked a hotel in Manhattan with an outdoor pool on the roof. By which I mean to say, Larry found the perfect hotel for me. Of course he and Jacob will love it too. It’s going to be the end of the day or the beginning and I’m going to be floating in a rooftop pool and feeling the sky and the vibrations and the sounds of New York City all around me.

What I feel about the money is: I feel like my dad just wanted me to be happy.

Pleasure and love

2008-08-04T20:45:00.003-04:00

Larry’s reading a letter I’m writing to my brother.

I have a lot of problems relating to my brother because of a bad thing he did and went to jail for a long time ago and which we’ve barely even talked about even though what he did made things very hard for me.

Larry’s going to make suggestions about better ways to say things. I usually forget any diplomacy when I’m seriously expressing my feelings to people. He’s going to point out places I completely skipped over important things I feel. Suppressing feelings forever and then learning how not to doesn’t mean you still don’t continue to suppress the juiciest ones you can barely stand to feel.

Yesterday we dropped Jacob off at overnight camp. It’s the first time he’s been to one. He really wanted to go.

We were embarrassing him lurking around wanting hugs and kisses and to make sure he was going to be okay. He barely paid attention to all the last minute instructions we were giving him that we forgot to tell him on the three hour drive up there, actually it was more because of the horrendous traffic on the 400, but he was okay about our mentioning a forty dollar credit for him at the tuck shop.

We stopped in Gravenhurst on the way home, a place Larry remembers from vacationing there and thereabouts when he was young. We ate in the finest restaurant we could find and ordered a bottle of red wine to go with our meal.

We’re learning how to drink wine and took turns describing the one we were drinking. First we couldn’t come up with too many words. The more we drank the easier it was to come up with words to describe it. We were very funny.

Initially I toasted to “pleasure” but Larry thought that was too hedonistic so I toasted to “pleasure and love.” Then, as our funniness increased, Larry got on the theme of appreciating one another and I said that was the reason I toasted to “pleasure” and Larry felt bad because he thought I’d switched it to only “love.”

But I explained to him that he’d heard wrong, I hadn’t taken out the “pleasure” from the toast, I had just added the “love.”

Avoiding getting sucked in

2008-08-02T23:00:00.001-04:00

Apparently there’s a war waging between Eli and I to get Larry’s attention. Larry and I came home from a walk. I was finishing a story I was telling Larry. It was a story about a story I was reading.

I said, to Eli - hold on a second - I’m just finishing telling a story. Eli put an affectionate arm around Larry, stretched and made himself taller, yawned and belched loudly - the weapons of his secret war against my unworthy, since I was now in his presence, desire to finish telling my story.

Naturally Larry got distracted and lost track of what I was saying. To which I responded that I appreciated that Eli’s presence must be distracting Larry from our conversation and that it was okay with me if we picked it up later.

I deferred. I deferred but not without a hint of critical commentary. Eli responded with a cringe. It wasn’t really a cringe. It was like heat waves coming off of parking lot pavement in the middle of the summer.

Eli is so hostile towards me. If he was really pavement and our planet was closer to the sun I wouldn’t have a problem. He would just melt away, big globby black pavement melts.

It’s tricky when someone is angry at you and fighting with you but you’re not fighting with them but what it is you want means to them that you are.

I was going to say something to Eli about it. But with him so mad at me I couldn’t see the point. But neither do I want to walk around feeling cowed by him.

What do I do? I said to Larry, after. Larry was glad I asked for his advice. He said - ask me to step away with you to the side so you can finish what you are saying. It sounds like a good idea.

Beach at the Pinery

2008-08-01T00:18:00.002-04:00

We went to the Pinery to camp and hang out on the beach last weekend. The first day we got there the waves were high. Jacob let me use his boogie board and I figured out how to pick the biggest waves, wait, wait, wait and catch them just as they began to furl, then kick, kick, kick to stay with the rush of the ride as long as possible.

The waves came in waves; some small ones for a while, then a slew of big ones.

Larry didn’t stay in the water for long. He went back to shore and drew an elderly couple sitting in their beach chairs watching over the lake and their grandkids. Their daughter saw it and thought it was amazing how it captured them. That’s what Larry told me. Something like that. Naturally he wouldn’t have blown his horn so much.

He thought it was nice she said that. I wondered why she didn’t fall down on her knees beseeching him to give it to her. It was so beautiful. How could she live with herself knowing she didn’t do everything in her power to find some way to get it from him and give it to her parents?

Another day we went out and picked a spot behind a driftwood log. It wasn’t very crowded that day. A while later this couple decided to make their place at the beach right on the log. They were practically sitting on us. Even Larry who likes to arrange to sit with people nearby so he can draw them thought their choice of locale impertinent. They had two small kids with them.

We went out with this special ball we have that has a multi coloured tail and depending what part of the tail you catch you get a different amount of points. Their kids were playing in the water with a soft ball. A soft ball is the big kind of baseball, the kind you play slo-pitch with. They’re called soft but they’re actually hard. The girl who was older was throwing it at the boy and it hit him hard on the leg, right below the knee and hurt him. He went in and sat between his parents like he was hurt. They didn’t know what to do about it. They looked like they were trying to decide whether to take him seriously or not.

Larry was back on shore again and I was playing with our special striped-tail ball with Jacob and kept looking in towards Larry on the shore but this other family sitting on the log directly in front of him kept getting in the way of my beacon of familial love connection from lake to shore with Larry.

You should always take your children to the beach their whole lives because it helps you become more aware of the invisible umbilical cords that are still there that yank at your soul and your gut making you certain you will never allow any harm to come to them which reminds you of and makes you feel the same kind of cord you also have with your spouse.

You shouldn’t, if you can help it and the beach isn’t too crowded, sit directly in front of another family and interfere with their umbilical cord connections.

Temperamental

2008-07-30T00:14:00.001-04:00

This guy I was talking to at work on the phone today did this thing, this thing I think is a guy thing. It made me so angry. I had to keep putting him on hold to try to get control of my temper.

Towards the end of the call he puts his kid on the line to take down an address I’m telling him to send information to because he can’t write and before he puts the kid on he asks me to cooperate with the kid like the way I’m acting with him isn’t being that way and has everything to do with me and nothing to do with his feeling so damn comfortable subtly taking control of our conversation because of my natural social deference toward him, alternating with my outright frustration in the face of how he’s managing to maintain the conversation on his own ignorant terms when he knows fuck all about fuck but is acting like it’s me not him when its him not me.

There’s a new QAA (Quality Assurance Advisor) sitting across from me temporarily, a guy, and he is so low key and so receptive I’m starting to get self-conscious around him. I’m starting to notice myself wanting to act ways that I think he would like so he’ll like me.

I have to keep putting the guy driving me crazy on the phone on hold. I’m telling the guy temporarily sitting across from me what I’m doing. He’s being encouraging. I’m telling him this guy on the phone is making me so mad I can’t function. I’m telling myself it’s good I’m telling the guy sitting across from me temporarily this because I don’t want to act like I’m someone I’m not for him even though I also do want to do that so he’ll like me. But I also don’t want to do it because on what basis would I be acting? I would be out of control. I would be in a fantasy of what I thought he thought was beautiful.

In reality what do I know about what he thinks is a nice way for a person to act? I only know what I think. I only know how close or far away I am to being the way I want to be, like even though I feel embarrassed for having this problem with this guy on the phone I can tell who I am by the ugly unfortunate issue I’m having with him acting like he’s the sweetheart and I’m the problem when he’s not the sweetheart.

On my bathroom break I look at myself in the bathroom mirror when I’m washing my hands. I’m wearing a nice pink necklace I got at the beach which makes my skin colour from my sun tan from being at the beach look pretty but it’s also drawing attention to the stringy, up and down wrinkles on my neck that look like the way a chicken’s neck looks. The QAA sitting across from me looks young. How could a guy like that like me when I’m so old looking? I’d have to fool myself pretty hard to see a young looking face looking back at me. My nice hair cut helps though.

This morning walking into the mall, which I walk through to get to work, a man opened the door for me. I couldn’t understand why he would open if for me. I don’t act the way men want me to. I don’t act the way they think is beautiful. So why would one open the door for me? But then I see this woman walking towards me who looks like a regular normal woman, with regular prettiness, and I think he would open the door for her too. I look normal enough just like she does. Why shouldn’t he open the door for me too? It’s something men do sometimes for women, for regular women. How it’s actually easier to open a door for an older woman who isn’t beautiful anymore. How it’s also easier when you’re an older woman to have the door opened for you.

Men

2008-07-29T00:10:00.001-04:00

No idea really how to talk to men. Not just talk but develop relationships with. My girlfriends talk to them.

Actually I can and do talk to them. Actually I’m married to one.

But I can’t handle the going into the abstractness to deal with the opposite sexes of ourselves between us. It’s not that I’m not smart. I’m smart enough. I just can’t remember who I’m supposed to be when I’m acting like that. I’m sorry.

I’m okay if I have something to discuss. Work. The workiness of our workingness together is a good subject of communication, isn’t it? But look! Behold my girlfriends. They are having much more interesting conversations with them. They look like they’re enjoying themselves. What are they talking about? How are they doing it?

I think it’s technical. I’m squinting my eyes so I can focus in on and study their moves. I’m making better friends with my girlfriends too. We have more in common than I thought. I should have been appreciating them more before. Now I am.

No title yet

2008-07-21T23:55:00.001-04:00

First we saw Richard. He was looking across the street at the parking lot of the plaza. He had this wild and excited look on his face. There were other kids too running toward him bigger kids. He didn’t look like he was scared of them so I was wondering if it was a game they were playing, like tag. Like Richard, they were also turning around looking at the parking lot. The way they spread out together in one flowing motion was like they were some kind of spawn brought in by the tide. They looked like the characters running alongside Tom Cruise in the War of the Worlds remake about the future that are being chased down by mechanical robots with guns from outer space.

We told Richard that Jacob was over behind Chat, the Hebrew Day School with two tennis rackets if Richard wanted to go over and play with him. Richard had sweat on the back of his head hairs at his collar. He had sweat on his bangs. Richard always hangs around the park getting in on every possible game he can.

Richard said, sure he was going to do that. He said there was a fight over in the parking lot. He walked toward it to show us where it was happening. There was a guy on his back down on the ground. He was moving his limbs but staying down. Larry was asking Richard who the kids involved were to find out if the guys involved were the same two kids who took Jacob’s baseball glove in the spring because Larry’s still planning to call those kids to task when he gets the chance. Richard stared over at the movement in the parking lot and answered Larry’s questions.

I was calling Jacob on my cell phone to let him know Richard would be coming over to play with him but decided not to because Richard didn’t look like he was ready to go yet.

The kid who was lying down stood up with some of his friends around him. Larry and I started walking toward a girl standing near the outfield foul territory of the baseball diamond. She said she knew the guys who were fighting. We walked past this other kid who was standing straddled over his bike watching the parking lot. A guy playing left field was trying to get his attention because someone had just hit a fowl ball right beside this kid. He was trying to get the kid to throw the ball back to him so he wouldn’t have to walk all the way over to the edge of the field to get it himself.

Larry called Jacob to tell him Richard should be coming over to play tennis with him soon, to stay where he was and not to come over to the park because there had just been a fight but Richard would be there soon.

When we were a few blocks away part way down the hill that goes to the valley Jacob called us from the park to tell us the kid who we had seen lying down had been stabbed. Larry told me he had seen something red on the kid’s back but he just thought it was just his friend had something red in his hand. I told Larry I didn’t notice anything red on the kid’s back. The police were coming and the two kids who had done it were hiding behind the Irving Chapley Community Center.

Larry called Jacob back to tell him if the police ask him any questions to not tell them anything because Jacob didn’t see anything first hand and it was up to people who saw things first hand to let the police know what they saw. Larry said to me Jacob has a do-gooder tendency that could get him labelled as a snitch.

We were going to walk along the path beside the river but right away it was way too full of mosquitoes. I told Larry I couldn’t take it anymore, I needed to turn back. We were running. It took a while for us to lose the mosquitoes even though we were way past where they had first started to bother us.

Sleepover

2008-07-19T14:18:00.001-04:00

Jacob’s friend Spenser slept over. They go to school together. Its Jacob’s first year at the school. He should have made friends with this kid sooner.

They are playing Halo. For a while they were fighting zombies on the front porch. When fighting zombies it’s important to rearrange all the porch furniture. I learned that when I came home and found the furniture that way.

Jacob has so many toy guns. He still likes playing with them and when his friends come over so do they.

It’s hot out. We have air conditioning. It’s better to not go out.

Spenser is twelve. Jacob turns twelve in a week and is worried he won’t get a birthday party again this year. Last year none of his friends were around. You can’t have a birthday party when there’s no one around to invite.

Jacob and Spenser giggle a lot.

Dead things

2008-07-03T12:22:00.000-04:00

- Eli and Jake went down to the valley and brought home a brown snake. It was so sweet. It would stick out its tongue to smell the air when you came by to visit it. I talked to it every day.

Then Jacob left the top of the aquarium open a tiny crack. It was such an athletic snake. We knew it could get out because it was always finding ways to climb up to the top of the aquarium and curl up beside the light. It got out.

Just as Eli was leaving on his trip for leadership training in the reserves for two months, he found the snake. It was curled up in one of his boots.

Eli put the snake back in the aquarium. It was just a small snake. It wasn’t supposed to have so much personality. According to the article we read on the internet it was supposed to be nocturnal and maybe not want to eat the worms we fed it so soon after being captured. And just sleep under things we put in there with it to sleep under.

The snake wasn’t the same after being found in Eli’s boot. (Eli does have pretty smelly feet) Its eye it looked at me with was dull like it didn’t know me anymore. It didn’t stick out its tongue. It didn’t curl up so much but laid more in a straight line. He could barely lift his head.

- My dad.

- The two stuffed grape leaves which no one ate that were in a bowl initially covered in saran wrap but then the saran wrap came off, and moved around to various locations in the fridge depending on where there was room for them in relation to the other stuff in the fridge, for the past two weeks.

Ching-Mei

2008-06-02T23:02:00.002-04:00

Ching-Mei came back from her father’s death in Brantford, her almost breakdown, her extended stay in the mountains of Kyoto in Japan not talking to anyone but her old friend from art school in the evenings, who is living there, who she stayed with. She came back from blending from everyone assuming her Japanese, her short bangs and black Asian hair bun with pointy bits growing slightly more pointy, from the pleasure of being a part of but of perfectly not understanding one syllable so just by herself alone understanding. Finally.

She came back to her job at the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security Call Center in Scarborough when she planned to look for new mountains, but seeing everyone, everyone convinced her not to, just to work less hours so it wouldn't be so draining.

I didn’t realize how much I missed her.

War cry

2008-05-24T16:50:00.000-04:00

Eli took a long shower. He turned on his music very loud. Very very loud. I yelled at him from the top of the stairs. No reply. I yelled at him from the bottom of the stairs. Again, no reply. I knocked on his partly opened door and as he turned to me, wearing only a white towel wrapped around his waist and bending over to do something with his feet or his ankles, yelled at him from there. Yelled at him to turn the music down.

I didn’t really have to yell at him from there, I suppose. Its uncomfortable walking up behind someone’s back who doesn’t know you’re there and you don’t even know where they are exactly but just see them all of a sudden, because he could have been in his other room. And they’re barely dressed.

It would be different if I was a hunter. Eli is a kind of hunter. He’s in the military reserves and goes out on weekends to do war games exercises. When he comes home he’s always barely slept and talks excitedly in a loud voice.

I like turning up the music loud too sometimes. When Eli does it, downstairs, in his apartment, so you can hear it all over the house, it makes me think of some kind of war cry to scare your enemy. Like you know how the bagpipe music of the Scots was supposed to put fear into the hearts of its enemies. Except for me personally bagpipe music gives me a chill, but not the scary kind, and makes the back of my head tingle. Like in recognition.

The dynamics of this situation suggests to me that if you’re a warrior emitting, in whatever form, your battle cry you should be careful to not get so caught up in the miraculous and scary power of your cry that you forget that your deafening sounds provide an excellent opportunity for your enemy to use it as a cover and to stealthily attack you from behind.

Ships at sea

2008-05-03T15:19:00.001-04:00

Most days during the week I work at a government call centre for Canada Pension and Old Age Security. My desk is dark. A woman came by I trained with and observed I have a lot of yellow sticky notes up. That’s what she noticed about my desk space. It’s funny when people notice things about you, you didn’t realize.

Some of the sticky notes actually say the same things because one of the programs we run is enormous and archaic and I hardly ever use it unless I have to so sometimes I accidently put up a sticky note I already put up before, not being able to find the original among the copious sticky notes I already put up. I have a helpful attitude towards myself even if I’m not always able to take myself up on it.

The other service agents and I have a lot of different programs running at the same time for looking up different things. I actually feel fairly magnificent running all these programs at the same time, like a captain of a large sailing ship at sea. Even if the person in the cubicle right beside me on the other side of separating wall between us is sailing her own magnificent galleon too. And even if we really were on ships they could collide and make a big mess at sea and everyone would drown in the high rolling waves.

Before I got the person who’s sitting beside me now I had a really mean person. She was really ugly too. If I was eating food she didn’t like the smell of she would go and tell my supervisor and not even say anything to me first. She could hear me chewing gum through the partition and told me to stop but then when I forgot that her step-mother said chewing gum is disgusting and not for ladies.

I don’t know why she told me it was her step-mother because that completely gave away probably why she was so mean, because she hadn’t had a proper mother-bond when she was growing up. Then at Christmas she gave me a Christmas card that included her husband’s, her dog’s and her fish’s name showing her friendly and unique side. She was laughing about the adorable interestingness of herself and her signing her fish’s name to the lady on the other side of her cubicle who’d she’d known for a long time and who was nice to her maybe because she was used to her, and to me at the same time. The mood was festive. It was thoughtful of her to give me the card. But I still couldn’t figure out with her whether I was coming or going.

Then it was her who was going. I was glad but didn’t gloat when I stood up to go to the bathroom or on break and was able to look directly down into her area. She decided to leave for a short term placement in another office for a change. It’s not that she told me personally. A team email from my supervisor advised me of the change. Usually I don’t complain about people but I did about her. I told my friends who I eat lunch with in the call centre how mean she was and they looked at her and declared that just by looking at her they could see it too.

When the new person moved in she asked if I would please try seeing how I liked it having the overhead light turned out because she would like to have them out. I said I’d try. They’re regular overhead fluorescent office lights. Then, phew, the second they turned the overhead light off I felt such a relief. So, I said, no problem, let’s leave them out. Perhaps the new person instantly liked me but that’s not why I did it. I did it because it felt so much better. I have no regrets even if it is darker. I have a light right at my desk too which I can turn on. To make it brighter, ideally what I could do is try to get a seat at the end of one of the cubicle rows near a window. Then, it wouldn’t be stressful fluorescent type. It would be natural sunlight. But I wouldn’t want to ask to move because I wouldn’t know who I’d be sitting beside if they moved me. I might get someone awful again.

Since ours is the phone line for pensioners we get a lot of calls from elderly people. Last Thursday, after I helped one - a lady - over the phone with a problem she was having, she said, bless your heart. It’s not the first time. My posture straightens and my heart feels all light and aglow when it gets blessed.

My sister's favour

2008-04-26T14:11:00.003-04:00

My sister sent me an email in which she told me bad things were going to happen to me if I didn’t do what she wanted me to do which according to her is the right thing to do. We’re not a religious family. I guess you don’t have to be religious to suppose that your morality is better than another’s.

How my sister is acting reminds me of how my mother was with me when I was growing up. She’d cast you out if you didn’t maintain the same perspective as her. I know that now that I’m a grown up I shouldn’t be so worried about being cast out. My therapist told me so. But it’s still a really bad feeling when your sister tells you your thoughts and feelings are going to lead to you losing your husband and children too.

I feel helpless.

It’s like chain letters. I actually emailed back a supposed friend of mine who forwarded me one of those emails that say if you don’t forward the one that was sent to you to other unsuspecting victims, you will pay. Like a plane that had the loved ones of someone who didn't pass the chain letter on, crashed. Someone else who did the wrong thing got a bad disease and is seriously repentant. I said please don’t send me shit like this. I didn’t actually say shit. I’m just showing off to you my audience the possibility of how tough as nails I could theoretically be.

In the first place my sister lied to me to trick me into doing the thing she wanted me to do. But, if you look at it from her perspective since I am such a moral imbecile she had to. The only thing she did wrong, maybe, was not lie better. If you look at it from her perspective, knowing how wrongheaded she knows I am, she was only doing me a favour to help to get me to do the right thing.

From her perspective she has nothing to answer to if I say to her, you lied to me. It’s still all my fault for being the way I am.

I hate thinking about my sister’s perspective. It makes me feel sick.

Spring Saturday Morning

2008-04-19T10:50:00.001-04:00

Jacob is making pancakes. Larry is down in his studio making art. Jacob wants to know how much milk, how much baking powder, how many blueberries. He argues for one banana not two because he doesn’t like mashing the bananas. Different arguments. One is time based. He and Larry are going out in two hours to the park to play hockey. He doesn’t have time to mash another banana. Not a very compelling argument.

Larry went to bed alone last night. Left the bed alone this morning. Said nothing. During the night sometimes moved away at my light touch. Sometimes didn’t. It’s our first beautiful spring morning. We have one nice view from our house. It’s from lying in bed, gaze shooting part up, part over, looking through the third window pane, the one on the far left. Tree branches. Every other view shows some form of cold suburban innocuousness. I like curling up alone in bed in the mornings under the red down comforter and looking at the wind moving the branches.

I like them even now when they’re bare. After Larry and I make love on Saturday mornings I always ask him to open the blind on the third window pane so I can curl up by myself for a while and watch the wind in the trees.

M-in-law returns

2008-04-05T13:35:00.001-04:00

I didn’t want to go visit Larry’s mother last night. I put my shoes on and sat on a chair in the living room waiting for Larry, Eli and Jacob to get ready, dreading; also hoping that without my encouragement everyone else would take so long that by the time they were ready to leave it would already be tomorrow and it would be too late.

Jenny looked nice when we got there. She had on a shimmering pink top, a pearly kind of pink, like the pink in Japanese paintings of magnolia trees in spring. She had a tan from wintering in Florida and her face looked tight and young and smooth. She had a trim fashionable hair cut.

I settled into fixing up a salad. Larry talked loudly to Eli and me about movies we’d recently seen in an attempt to avoid his mother’s dominating him for the entire evening. Jenny spilled some frozen peas on the floor and on the kitchen mat in front of the sink which I was standing on then didn’t tell me she was pulling the mat up even though I was still standing on it. Larry lectured her for not letting me know. I made a joke about it, pretending Jenny was like a magician doing the table cloth trick. You know the one where the magician pulls the table cloth out from under the table setting and the table setting doesn’t get upset but stays in its place.

You see how visiting Jenny is tricky?

Sure we can agree that Larry acted correctly by being direct with Jenny about pulling the rug from underneath my feet. But what about his initial actions? What about his discussion with Eli about movies? If he’d paid a little more attention to Jenny at the outset would she have felt the need to disrupt the discussion by spilling the frozen peas all over the place?

And what of my actions? Why couldn’t I have just finished making the salad at home the way I usually do? Why didn’t I consider that with Jenny only recently returned from Florida she might not have a critical ingredient such honey available for the dressing causing her to endlessly make hard to pay attention to suggestions while I was also trying to listen to Larry’s entertaining banter, about other possible sweetening alternatives even after I’d made my decision about what to substitute?

Never mind my ludicrous joke comparing Jenny’s inconsiderate actions that might have knocked me off my feet to magician’s doing tricks with table cloths. We’d been there a mere ten minutes and clearly my mind was already seriously in escapist mode.

About my dad dying

2008-04-04T14:32:00.002-04:00

Larry’s blogging again. Now I am too. The last one he did was about my dad dying.

Larry actually drew a picture of my dad on his death bed. It’s a beautiful picture even with the oxygen tube snaking up from a pillow like place at the right side of the page to a clear mask covering his nose and mouth.

One piece of supporting medical apparatus at a time, in keeping with my father’s wishes to not be kept alive if there was no reasonable chance of survival, the tube was eventually removed.

Driving back and forth from London for the two weeks we thought he might be okay then was going to die for sure we got into stopping at various Starbuck’s locations for Carmel Macchiatos with soy milk. We don’t usually drink coffee. Drinking all that sweet, soothing, milky coffee was a really nice thing about my dad dying.

The nurse wasn’t sure how long it was going to take my dad to die. It all depended. She was sitting outside of the room. At a certain point of progress, one of the other support staff had turned off the machines in the room showing his vital signs. I think the idea was to make it less macabre. What we didn’t realize, but which of course makes sense since watching over my dad dying was her job, the nurse was looking at an entire other set of machines showing his vital signs at the end of the hall.

She was being really nice but still being vague about the time line and it seemed like we were in a lull and might have to hunker down for a while so Larry went out to get some more excellent soy Carmel Macchiatos for us plus some regular coffee for my brother and sister.

I didn’t want to go in case I missed anything. Then it turned out my brother, sister and I all wanted to be able to see the vital signs so we had the nurse turn the machines back on. Which is when we noticed the heart rate numbers dipping really low which is when the nurse told us, yes, she’d noticed that happen a few times already and thought he might be going but that he’d fought his way back. Which at first made me think he’d fight his way back again but then he wasn’t.

I wished she’d said something earlier about this before Larry went out for the coffees.

The heart monitor was going down but then it stuck at the same low number, maybe thirty. I was looking away from it so I heard the nurse saying it first - that he was gone - before seeing the number zero. But then a few seconds later he breathed again, a big full breath, making me certain the nurse was wrong, my dad was still there. He was on his way back again. He was charging back. But the nurse said, no, that the big breath was just the death rattle.

Second Seder

2007-04-06T19:26:00.000-04:00

For second Seder we went over to the Dolgin’s who do a really big one, like over fifty people. We know them through Jacob who is best friends with one of their sons. We went last year too.

Even though the Dolgin’s are so nice and make you feel like their most special and welcome guest I was going through some periods of feeling extremely alienated throughout the ceremony. It would have been better if Larry was sitting beside me and I could touch him like he was last year but this year he was across from me.

It’s just there’re so many things that are part of the ritual that I don’t know. I could learn them, but I don’t care to. So you see where that puts me? I would say it puts me in one of my usual positions, that of feeling like a child who has no choice, like a victim of my circumstances.

I was thinking, what was I thinking, converting to Judaism? I was thinking how it was just another one of those things I could say, okay, sure no problem, I’ll give you this, to. I’ll embrace this whole entire religion with rituals and a different language with different letters. Why not? What’s the big deal? Why wouldn’t I add another way to feel overwhelmed and alienated from the world? What’s the difference?

I was crying, thinking of my mother. My father told me recently that when he met my mother she pretended to be Jewish. She did. She did it because her mother cleaned houses for Jewish people and my mother got it in her head that being Jewish was better. Can you imagine my converting all equaling some perverse way for me to please my mother I could never please? I didn’t even know.

Escaping from Egypt is a story that lifts you because it’s a story. Sometimes I think all stories are lies. I was thinking about the ritual of it, of the parallel between that escape and escaping from the lies of pretending to be what I am not, an inherited tendency from my mother, my mother who I don’t talk to, because she expects me to be something I’m not, rejects me when I won’t.

I didn’t used to like Passover so much. I was more a fan of Rosh Hashanah, about planning, looking forward, the power of living inside a metaphor with a productive God-driven purpose, how the Moon is always in the same shape and the same place in the sky when you’re going to break the fast after synagogue on Yom Kipper. I found Passover too much about looking back, too bitter. All the plagues.

For first Seder we did it at our house. I couldn’t bear to go to my mother-in-law’s again. Her place is always so stuffy. You feel like you can’t breathe. And Larry hates all his cousins. We couldn’t go to one of their houses. They act so superior.

I made a really nice meal. It was a lot of work. Jenny, my mother-in-law brought the gefilte fish. A ton of other things. Larry’s brother Mike came from London with his wife who didn’t convert and didn’t want to read from the Haggadah, “no thanks.” She was sitting beside me at the end of the table like after her it was just the emptiness of infinity.

Thinking of Magnolias

2007-03-26T16:03:00.000-04:00

I let Jacob sleep in because he couldn’t get to sleep last night. I didn’t feel like getting up either. But then I was just lying in bed. It was thundering. Thunder is so special this time of year, like it’s the frightening secret behind what makes things blossom, because there hasn’t been any for a while.

Jacob pretended to be much more tired than he was. The grey outside to go with dark clouds in the sky to go with thunder was getting in the house.

I put the windshield wipers on the fastest. Jacob sat in the front seat which he didn’t get to do before because of air bag safety. “Where does your air bag come out of?” he asked. I pointed to the area in the middle of the steering wheel. I asked where his was. He showed me a spot above the glove compartment.

Jacob said the windshield wipers looked angry with each other. How they were taking turns attacking each other. I told him I could see that. I told him, no more chocolate before bed because it makes your body go all - and I made this zapping jolting spasm holding my arms out spastically too of my body - and then you can't get to sleep. Jacob observed an especially big splotch of rain fall on the windshield just as I was doing my imitation monster of Frankenstein. He noticed how it was the perfect dramatic finale of my contraction.

The rain fell harder and the rain drops spread bigger on the windshield despite the angry wipers’ efforts to get to and at each other. They look like mini-bullets from a helicopter, Jacob said.

Than I dropped him off late at the school where last year his French teacher suggested he might have a learning disability because he doesn’t pay attention to the dumb way she teaches French which is just about rote and facts and she would never think of how when there’s a story behind something it makes it that much easier to understand.

When I think of her saying that it makes me feel like an angry windshield wiper trying to get at something but instead only able to wipe away the tears that are also the rain.

Measures

2006-12-06T15:56:00.000-05:00

I was talking to some of my fellow swimmers today. One was a chattery nervous woman. She initiated. First she apologized for butting in front of me earlier. She apologized at a point when I was resting at the end of the pool and she was making a turn. She was actually talking to me while she was turning but she kept thinking of more qualifications to add to her explanations so her turn was taking longer and longer.

She was right to apologize. What she did really pissed me off. I’m allowed to feel that way again these days. I used to think I shouldn’t. Not that I wouldn’t be disdainful. I surely would be that.

You don’t just jump in front of someone and then start swimming your big splashy kick style swimming. Right in front of them!

So then I had to swim around her and make sure to not get run down by the people swimming down the lane on the other side of the lane. Her apology was she was gauging my speed was why she did it. It was nice she apologized. But what a pathetic one. I just can’t imagine.

Well maybe I can. Maybe she has no ability to gauge people’s speed in the pool visually.
She can’t look ahead. Yet she has a strong need to know by measuring. In which case, just jumping in the pool a reasonable distance after or even before someone so you eventually caught up to them or they, say after a few lengths, caught up to you might not register especially if your inability to gauge speed visually also extended to an inability to gauge speed through your process over an extended period of time. Like waiting a few lengths to find out who is faster.

The way she would be in the world, the way she would need to measure things would be like a human thermometer. Like if you were cooking a turkey you would stick her long slim nervous body with its sore shoulders from doing backstroke - she told me about that later - right in it. You would watch the red mercury line that measures the turkey’s interior temperature grow longer to see if was up to 450 degrees yet, to let you know if it was time to take it out of the oven and rest it on the counter for a little while with tin foil over it. But do you put the tin foil over the turkey while it’s cooling down or is it only for roast beef you do it that way?

Good form

2006-11-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

I was taking extra long strokes for my swim today. Just concentrating on form. I’ve always done that. I’ve always swum my best when I just think about form and don’t think about the importance of trying hard and going fast. That stuff will fall in place if you let it. I was thinking that’s all there is to it, to writing, staying on the inside of the form of your experience, being creative with that.

If you were a caveman you might be the one in your group to tell the stories for the clan. It would be okay for you to have a need to express yourself creatively. It wouldn’t be purposeless. Like, when I was in grade two some of the other kids were reading so fast. Denise Pillon, who liked to put a section of her hair in her mouth and suck it making me wish I had long hair and could do that too, read so fast. The words coming out of her sounded so sharp, so articulate. What was important to me, what I felt not only distinguished me from the rest of the class but was a value I would uphold even if it meant I was only going to get to be in group two for the average readers and not group one for good readers, was reading with expression!

So there would be a purpose for my stories in that small caveman group, for my need to be the way I was. But then the world got bigger.

About half way through my swim workout my lane got eliminated. There’s this water aerobics group that comes in and I think the way it works is if it’s a large group they put them in the big pool where us swimmers swim our lengths, squeezing us into less lane space. And when it’s a smaller group they go in the training pool with the adjustable bottom.

I didn’t like how the water aerobics group pressed up against our lane, the mass of their bodies causing the lane rope to push in, giving us even less room within our more crowded lane to accommodate each others’ strokes. Even though the windows of the pool are to the south and the water aerobics people are to the east, they still feel like a heavy cloud, blocking out the light. Like a dark cloud of locusts from a story of a far away land.

Monday morning

2006-11-20T13:22:00.000-05:00

We had snow last night. Not much. I was looking at it through Jacob’s window, after opening the blind to let the light in to help him wake up, on the neighbour’s roofs. But I thought it was just frost. Then when I was in the kitchen I looked out the front door and saw some sprinkles on the car and across the street in the part that’s just dirt of Magda’s garden, around her cedar bushes. I said, “Look Jacob, we had snow.”

Going outside to get in the car Jacob said the snow looked like the little Styrofoam bits that come in packaging. It looked fake.

I liked that he said that.

Two fire trucks blocked Yonge Street just before where you turn off to the street Jacob’s school is on. It must have just happened because traffic wasn’t too backed up yet but no one was getting past. The trucks were red. Their lights were flashing. You could see them up ahead.

I pulled over to the left hand turn lane and got off the street. I felt smart doing that. Not everybody has such good traffic-jam avoiding skills. Larry does. But come on, he’s a guy. Different standards apply. I drove around the traffic obstruction and got Jacob to school on time.

Jacob's homework

2006-11-19T15:54:00.000-05:00

Jacob is doing a univocal poem for his grade five English class. He’s only allowed to use one vowel for the entire poem. He was going to do “I” but I thought it was too hard. I told him to do “O.” For “O” you can use Yoko Ono. Except I had to tell him who that is. You could use the John of John Lennon and almost the Lennon.

Jacob’s really into cooking lately. We were watching the hockey game last night but it was a pretty boring game. So Jacob was in the kitchen mixing the spices for the next time we make spaghetti. Next time instead of taking the spices from the different spice containers and putting them in a little at a time, you just use the pre-mixed spices he’s already created.

He thought it was a great idea.

Jacob’s univocal poem isn’t making any sense. I told him it might help if he tried to write around a theme. Unfortunately there’re not many “O” words about hockey. That’s his idea. He wants to write it about hockey the same way he wrote his last poem, a fourteen line poem with fourteen syllables in each line, about hockey.

Jacob likes to scoot out of his work before it’s entirely done. He’s driving me a little crazy. I’m telling him to do the poem on his own but now I’m helping him.

Last week his teacher told him he thinks his mother (me) is helping him too much with his homework. It’s impossible not to that at his school, an Arts School where the kids end up having to do oodles of the regular curriculum at home with their parents showing them how and what to do and then maybe influencing them too heavily.

The problem is I get these excellent ideas when I’m helping him and then I tell them and then he agrees. So we put them down. Or I coach him to bring out some of his excellent perceptions only I don’t think the other parents are quite so creative at getting their kids to express the perceptions that are in their heads.

It was very upsetting to hear the teacher thought I was doing that even though the teacher didn’t say it directly to me and what is that all about. Jacob thinks I’m going to hear about it at the parent-teacher interview in two weeks, so be prepared.

Jacob’s univocal poem with my assistance:

The Eclipse of the Moon

World blots
Wolf howls to
Cow hops onto
No logos
Yoko Ono longs for John

Comparing pain, fiction and nonfiction

2006-11-16T16:33:00.000-05:00

The thing you never could do living with Larry’s mom and dad was compare pain. That was why they were so much better than you in every way if you were him and always would be. Their pain was the deepest pain ever.

Imagine being born into that. What would it be like?

Should I say it? Would it be intrusive?

….very painful.

I was just reading about a symposium at the University of Texas featuring Norman Mailer. They were talking about Mailer's novel, The Executioner's Song, which he had written with the assistance of Gay Talese and Lawrence Schiller.

Unfortunately I was reading it on the Daily Texan Online serving the University of Texas at Austin since 1900 with the flashing advertisements on the side intensely detracting from my reading pleasure.

They were talking about fiction verses nonfiction. I liked this paragraph the most, “The important question is whether there is a difference between fiction and nonfiction and to what degree it matters, Talese said."That's what Norman asks, 'Does it matter?' and I don't think it really does," Talese said.”

It’s not the great Norman Mailer’s opinion, and I mean ‘great’ in no pejorative way, no siree. I've changed. But all the same it stands up so nicely and comfortably and securely and gentlemanly to the challenge of the question of the questioner.

Talese says, “... and I don’t think it really does.”

And, little me, I agree! I agree.

Stepson

2006-11-13T14:07:00.000-05:00

The great problem of Elijah who would never ask me to call him that when he was changing over to it, then resent me because I don’t. Full name is Elijah but was always called Eli. Like an eel followed by a lie. I used to call him Squiggly when he was a young boy, for a while. He liked it.

Talks in that big loud authoritative voice in the back seat of the car he always talks in, making it hard to face the road, telling his grandmother he’s signed up to go to Afghanistan in the reserves next winter. Hasn’t told us yet. She’s devastated. He says he’s surprised. One of the main things he does with that voice is make it sound very mature and responsible. His surprise is dignified.

He likes drama and to be the center of attention. It’s his nature. I don’t think he knows it though.

He always feels left out like it’s your fault. Pause. But how is it I’m responsible he’s such a surly angry shit to be around. Larry used to always blame Eli’s mother which is true but tries not to do that any more because it’s also not true. It’s a bad habit.

Finally going to see a therapist. We begged him. Larry did. He doesn’t take anything I say seriously. He’s usually too preoccupied putting up a big cold front for several million reasons in his head. There’re some things we just can’t help you with. My coaching job. You need to go outside of family.

It makes us sick to be around his constant blaming. We’re home sick today. But really we’re just sick. Post-nasal drip. Blech. It’s not his fault.

He’s so hard to be around. He’s getting better; I think the therapist is helping.

Things can get worse for a while when they’re getting better.

New envelopes

2006-11-07T13:00:00.000-05:00

It’s hard to write when you’re in the process of submitting your manuscript. That’s the problem.

I drove up to JC Appliance Ltd today to buy new parts for the blender after I dropped Jacob off at school but they didn’t open until 9 so I sat in the car reading Anna Karenina. I’m still at the start. I haven’t met Anna yet.

Since JC Appliance Ltd is right beside a Staples I went in there too to buy some new regular size envelopes, #10 size, because I’m almost out from sending out so many query letters and self addressed stamped envelopes.

I decided to splurge and get the more expensive ones with the adhesive you just pull off when you’re ready to send instead of using the pink foam soaker thing that’s always too wet for activating the glue when I’m at the post office. I also bought a new stapler; it’s pink too - a girly pink, and some whiteout. I wouldn’t want to run out of whiteout one day.

I always hate it when people might be seeing what I want. I don’t like being so vulnerable to their being against me for wanting it. I asked the girl at the Staples if she knew of where a post office was nearby. There was one over at York University. There was one up Highway 7 way. There was one near Bathurst and Steeles.

Forget about the one near the university. The parking’s crazy in there. And about heading way up to Highway 7. She wasn’t sure where exactly the one at Bathurst and Steeles was. She wanted to think, “Maybe in the Drug Store?” It’s so nice when people who aren’t really sure of a thing let you know.

I couldn’t find it. So I went to my regular postal outlet, the one I was wanting to be hiding from and the woman who always sees me there sending off my query letters and manuscript requests served me like she always does and was really nice and not the least bit judgmental-seeming just like she always is.

Even though I’ll probably be afraid to go back to the post office again next time, afraid of being seen, I still tell myself when it’s happening, when I’m sealing closed the envelopes with the too wet round pink foam thing that wets the envelopes in the wrong places, smudges the ink, leaks on the counter then spreads onto my sleeves, “pay attention to how the world around supports you even in the smallest ways.” I just need to learn to let it be.

Time change

2006-10-29T17:37:00.000-05:00

I haven’t been writing that much lately because of being all squeezed up in freaked-outness. I think the music I keep listening to when I’m driving in the car is like my secret drug of mothers that they take except for me it’s just the drifting-awayness of the music. I think my son, when I’m driving him, could be looking at me and thinking or not thinking - just feeling and experiencing – the vibe of the drifty freaked-out mother vibe.

The time went back for daylight savings time so we got an extra hour which is making the quiet gray, of the almost November day ending, grow darker sooner.

When I’m feeling this way I just want to stab at it, the darkness coming on, stab and stab like if something inside me could get at it, see things more realer, sweet flashes of red autumn leaves, how much better.

Another dentist visit!

2006-10-26T19:32:00.000-04:00

It was Jacob’s turn at our new dentist today. We love our new dentist. He gives this enthusiastic lecture about all you need to do is brush your teeth really well two times a day and do it properly and you shouldn’t even be getting any cavities. Every time he does it, it’s so sincere and fresh. I know because I watched him give it to Jacob plus I got my own last week too. Our dentist’s face is so happy. It’s like a clown face.

He’s so much better than our old dentist. Our dentist is a great man. That’s what you think. It’s so nice to think that about someone. It makes you want to go back and see him for your next appointment in six months. It makes you want to brush your teeth.

Jacob agreed.

But first he was experiencing dental tragedy. Jacob has this kind of a big square-faced head. It’s one of the things that makes him look like me. It’s our family resemblance. Because he’s only ten, lately, his big square head has been looking too big for his body. I think it has to do with how kids grow sometimes, how different parts of their bodies develop at different speeds. Or maybe it’s his hair. I think actually it’s just the way his hair has been growing that is making his head look bigger and exaggerating its squareness.

Jacob’s big square-head face, which is my big square-head face, is graying over as the dental tragedy befalls him. He can’t abide the taste of the toothpaste they use - it doesn’t matter what kind it is - and yes, bad-flavored toothpaste at dentists’ includes cherry bubblegum.

“That’s it?” The dentist wants to know. He moves quickly past incredulity to sympathy keeping pace with the tenor of Jacob’s traumatic situation. Did I say how great our new dentist is? “That’s all you’re so worried about?” And then the square-head face gagging repeatedly, the tears sliding down its boxy sides, the many needed pauses. I smile inadequately at the dentist’s assistant. I smile past her at my beautiful square-head faced boy.

Technical concerns

2006-10-24T16:52:00.000-04:00

My poor computer grows senile. It hums and whirs like an old vacuum cleaner with something stuck in it. Didn’t we used to have a pet budgie around here? Larry tried to install a new printer to it. It refused to recognize it. Furthermore it refused to tell us it didn’t recognize it.

The new printer will be more efficient for printing out my manuscript. Manuscript. The word manuscript does sound very magnificent.

What I did while I was waiting for the computer to recognize the printer was nail clip my left big-toe’s toe nail. I get holes in my socks because my big toes are too big. But when I told Larry that he said it wasn’t the fact of the big toes being too big, it was the toe nails not getting clipped frequently enough. I couldn’t believe he thought that about me. Larry thinks I don’t cut my big-toe toe nails frequently enough.

I thought it would be funny to clip the big-toe toe nail while the toe was sticking out of the hole in the sock. It was funny.

Then I switched the socks around. I switched the feet the socks were on because only one of the socks had a hole in it. The reason I switched them to opposite feet was I thought if I did that it would switch the hole that my big toe sticks out of to the baby-toe side of the foot. Then the hole would just be there floating above the toes without the toes pressing their way out of the sock the way they do when it's big toes in the hole vicinity.

While I was switching the socks I couldn’t help but notice all the other nails on the other toes looking perfectly fine, at a reasonable length and in no need of being clipped. Which made me think, is the fact of the other toe nails not needing clipping a kind of proof of Larry being right that I don’t clip my big-toe toe nails often enough? Does the situation of my toe nails suggest that what I need to do is clip my big-toe toe nails twice as frequently as the other toes?

Is it all proof of the point that I am resisting that which is necessary? Yet it doesn’t seem fair or right, does it?

The sock switching didn’t work. It worked for a minute or two but then the toe and the sock worked together mysteriously to produce the same effect of sticking out big-toe on my other foot, my right foot.

It’s because the socks are cotton or a poly-cotton blend. I can get the sock-switch trick to work when I’m wearing wool socks.

What Larry’s going to do is install the new printer downstairs on his system. Then what I’ll be doing is printing my manuscript through the network.

Bird feeder

2006-10-22T16:23:00.000-04:00

Jacob’s not that committed to his studies. He tucks projects away and just leaves them tucked. As more of them build up his answers to questions about how things are going at school get smaller, more stubborn, like his mouth. He’s fine, he says.

Larry and I are learning not to wait. We prod with more confidence. We’re alternately gentle then assured where we used to be ferocious. Jacob still denies. He disseminates. Like how he might deal with hungry birds.

It would be nice to get a bird feeder. Maybe for Chanukah. I hate always buying things we don’t need just for the sake of buying something. A bird feeder would be really nice.

The hand that pulls your tooth out

2006-10-20T13:57:00.000-04:00

I was kept waiting a while for my new dentist, Dr Klein. Well, first I kept him waiting. He’s actually an orthopedic surgeon. I arrived late. Then my gut was killing me so bad. I had already gone to the bathroom but it still really hurt. I was feeling like things were beginning to go black around me.

So I told the receptionist I needed to go to the bathroom again and phoned up Larry. But I couldn’t talk. Because that’s how I get when my emotions get too big, too big to fit through my voice apparatus. Larry knows me enough, he was waiting. I said I was too scared to do it without him. He’s already had it done before so he told me in his voice, in the voice of Larry, it was going to be okay. I was going to be able to do it.

I was surprised. I thought someone feeling as bad and scared as I was couldn’t possibly continue on alone. But I took his word for it.

My face wasn’t as tear-faced when I went back in the office as it had been when I was telling Larry I couldn’t do it. What I’d planned to do was just walk up to the reception people and tell them I couldn’t do it. I'd come back later. What else I’d planned was just leave and phone them when I got outside of the building at some point and tell them then I couldn’t do it. It went back and forth which one I would do depending on how bad I was feeling.

The receptionist told me they had called for me when I was out. I decided not to feel like a terrible person for not being available right away and inconveniencing them when they called me. Even though I’d already showed myself to be that way by coming late to the appointment in the first place. Just a few minutes. Or ten.

Then they put me in one of the dentist’s work stations and I waited there for a while. A boring view of a mall on a rainy day through slats of blinds. Larry called. He said if I didn’t like the dentist I didn’t have to stay. I could just go. We could make other arrangements. We could call friends and find out somewhere else to go.

Dr. Klein’s style was majestic and magician-like. One of his main people tools was dramatic redirects. So I wasn’t sure how I was liking him especially based on what Larry said, that I could have a choice, because Dr. Klein was all about making you feel like you were so in his distracting hands you’d already made it, you didn’t want to change your mind from where you already were. You liked it in his hands.

I liked that he said his first and last name when he introduced himself to me. Now that I’m a grown up, I always find it very weird calling people by their last names. I can’t get used to it. I’m a grown up now too, right?

He told me it was going to be really easy, take only five minutes. He told me he might break the tooth apart in three sections. He’d see as he went. It wasn’t going to hurt.

I mentioned to him I was very scared. How I had been thinking about maybe just going back home.

I liked when he was freezing me he told me the one in the roof of my mouth was going to hurt. Actually the one he did before hurt too, in the corner of the jaw. My regular dentist was much more gentle with the needle. I thought it’s probably better that someone pulling out your teeth has a firmer touch. You don’t want someone tentative, overly concerned about your every momentary feeling, in a tooth-pulling situation.

He told me the freezing would take place quicker than I could tell a joke. Then joked when I didn’t have one.

I told him I was still really scared.

He explained to me about hearing strange sounds and feeling lots of pressure during the procedure. He pushed his hips up against my body as he started his maneuvering. Usually when people do that I kind of shrink away inside myself. It’s kind of inappropriate isn’t it? In this instance with his hands rooting away in my terrified mouth I didn’t feel like that at all. I just wanted to savor the feeling of his body’s press against mine.

He said I did good when we were done. His eyes looked in to mine really warmly. He shook my hand. That’s my new thing; loving shaking hands, so I was glad he did that. It makes me feel secure when I meet someone new to feel them through their hand. But I didn’t have my other new, “check out the vibe of his handshake” editor on. I was too tired. His hand looked big and fleshy and self-conscious. It had just pulled out my tooth.

Love flock 2

2006-10-20T12:36:00.000-04:00

I didn’t get my tooth pulled out. My new dentist Dr. Gwartzman wanted to take an x-ray just in case, just in case there might be a problem, a problem like having unusually extra long roots on your wisdom tooth going up to and running past the sinuses. See those fluffy spots? Those are the sinuses.

Dr. Gwartzman filled a cavity in my other tooth that I was going to be coming back for next week, for something to do with me instead in the time that was booked, the perfect time to daydream. I’m very talented at drifting away. When your mouth is wide open and getting operated on you’re really not under any regular kind of social pressure to engage in relevant conversation. There’s plenty of thoughts I have I can drift into.

But Dr. Gwartzman has this little quick way about him that brings you back to him, like his arm’s incisive gesture is asking you to stay there with him in the room. That’s when I realize Dr. Gwartzman is kind of something of an artist, how easy conversation is with him even though he can be a little insistent and detailed but it’s for safety reasons, he is a dentist. It’s easy because there’s this clean kind of world-view he’s got too, a philosophy. Something about Dr. Gwartzman tells me I could love him if I needed to. Maybe I already do.

My dentist’s face is small featured making him look child-like. He walks lightly on his feet. With his hair there’s a problem. It’s very thin but not balding. Isn’t that strange for a man? It’s more like the way a woman’s hair thins. And it’s suspiciously dark. His skin is very pale, like a mortician’s.

When he tells you what’s the matter with your teeth he keeps you lying down with your head craning back and up to look at him, like a session with a Freudian psychiatrist, but having the pressure to look.

I think he’s the kind of dentist who inspires love. His assistants and hygienists are great. They’ve all been with him for a long time and treat you really nice. It’s like they love him. I think they love him too. I think what’s happening is that I’m being captured into my dentist’s love flock.

What I don’t understand is even if my tooth’s roots are too long, why does he have to send me away to an oral surgeon for my extraction?

Exposing a nerve

2006-10-19T10:31:00.000-04:00

Incongruous juxtaposition. We were studying Stephen Leacock in grade six, the great Canadian humourist. How I loved this combination of words. I walked around saying it over and over again - but not out loud - in my head. Then I could feel the words moving around in there like the perfect high grade oil on starving pistons and gear mechanisms.

I wasn’t the type either who collected big words, please don’t think it was anything like that, and not because I wouldn’t like to portray myself that way, who wouldn’t? It was the first time I ever worked at remembering a big word, in this case two. Incongruous juxtaposition: Leacock: slay me with your words.

Shawn Green used to play baseball up here in Toronto with the Blue Jays. I didn’t notice him so much then. He looks better now, more scruffy, his right eye off, bending to the right when the camera studies him and looking bigger than the other one. He’s frayed, lost meat, from constant nerves reacting to the moment, like the moment of the ball colliding with the bat. Of making it do that; always less than perfectly: the game of baseball.

Most of the other players defend by getting bigger, fleshier. They hold their bats like toothpicks after eating too much dinner. With Green you think how close the other bones are to the flesh, the hip-bones underneath his baseball pants. You will him to be careful, when he makes his next pop-up slide to second.

I’m getting a wisdom tooth extracted in a few hours. Larry says it’s not going to hurt a bit. They’re going to freeze it up with Novocain and I won’t feel a thing. I guess it’s just the imagining of the extracting that hurts.

The tooth broke when I was eating a cookie. Then it broke again. Then a few weeks later - the pain - from nerves exposed and dieing. Not so bad at first, then worsening. Things to do for the pain: hold your chin with your hand; it sooths. Hold your temple with your hand when the pain spreads up there. Hold your head with both your hands when it’s feeling all over the place. Puff out your cheeks by blowing air into them. Eat soup. Don’t chew on things. No cold things. Blow out your right cheek only, the side the pain comes from. Don’t clench your jaw. Always keep the top teeth away from the bottom. Take aspirin before bed.

Sleep on the couch when the aspirin’s not working because you can’t sleep, to stop from keeping Larry awake part of the night too. Go back to bed when the pain calms down.

Did you know that back in his time the great Canadian humourist, Stephen Leacock opposed women’s rights? That his father was an alcoholic and left? I wonder what made Leacock think that way about women. Kind of an incongruous juxtaposition.

Running shoes

2006-10-18T10:26:00.000-04:00

This morning I walked by two ladies carrying running shoes. They were chatting. You could tell by what they were wearing and how they were walking that they were finishing up their morning exercise routine which wasn’t a very vigorous one. They were both fairly overweight.

They were wearing running shoes too. I looked up and down from the shoes on their feet to the shoes in their hands several times. They were wearing running shoes and carrying running shoes. White running shoes. One of them had a running shoe in each hand. Actually she had them so her hands were in the running shoes like the way you put your hands in socks after you’ve sewn buttons on for eyes and red felt for lips, when you’re using them for puppets. The soles of the shoes were facing out, towards me. The other woman had tied her running shoes together by the laces like you do with skates. How she was holding them was by looping the tied-together laces over one of her hands.

I was on my way to the variety store to buy some lemons.

Backyard

2006-10-17T22:42:00.000-04:00

I must be getting good at making love because my head doesn’t press up hard against the bedstead anymore.

We had two blue jays visit us this morning. We could see them through the bedroom window. Military-looking, their shoulders puffed up like a soldier’s army coat in winter and their defended heads pointing in both directions, frontward at the beak and backward at the crown.

I’m grateful for the trees in the backyard of one of our neighbours. Improper weed-like trees, excited by the wind, happy like a girl twirling a hula-hoop. They had been hammering something in behind them all summer long. I hope they won’t decide that it’s the kind of something we all need to see.

Because I like the trees. Every day I look out at them and tell Larry. I like the sky the birds fly away to, exit points from the square plots of the neighbours’ squeezing in. I know they have to be too stupid to notice; how enticing the grey sky is of fall.

Our neighbours turn their corners on the populated streets and parkways just as we do. I know they have to be too stupid so there’s a place to go to be with you alone.

Things not alone

2006-10-16T12:09:00.000-04:00

The problem with me is that I’m not alone the way I thought. The way I am is like a boat in water not able to make sudden stops and turns when I thought I wasn’t like that. I thought I could slip through things cleverly like without attachments. I am like a school of fish. I can’t just go somewhere alone without the rest of the school. We’re all together, one mass of body. I am like a peacock, with a tail, even if it’s not up and regal, I have to be dragging it behind me. I’m not alone. I am like getting married the way a princess does, pulling a great long train of my importance behind me.

Things are attached to me like flying a kite on a windy afternoon on a nice day in fall. I used to think I could snip it free. But that wouldn’t change it’s a part of me.

A bird was sitting itself on one of the Echinacea plants in the flower bed in front of the porch. Only a few of the flowers still had a touch of pink left to their bloom. Echinacea is also called purple coneflower. They still look nice but brown and barren like witchy things look nice when their blossom’s spent in fall. The bird was using its beak to eat the flowers, digging it into the furry cone head part which on Echinacea looks like a big round globe rising from out of the petals.

That was a month ago. He would grip his feet around one of the flower stalks but not necessarily get a good balance. So fly over to another one. Try and settle in there.

From what the bird did, some of the withering coneflowers now have large triangular chunks missing from their round globe coneflower heads. They look like they have mouths. The mouths look like they’re grinning and talking to each other.

Belonging

2006-10-15T17:43:00.000-04:00

The way I used to do it was just ignore the feeling and barge hard. It was the feeling of not belonging. I had graduated from university but didn’t know what to do. There was nothing left to do. So I signed up for another year at another university. I shouldn’t have really because I was kind of sick of writing essays about poems and writers. Kind of sick of proving how smart I really was never proving anything.

It was my home town. First I was going to university in another province far away. Then I was finishing up those credits at my home town university because I didn’t get them all, the way I should have. This time I was going to do it for real, push the hardest ever, prove to everyone how brilliant I was, try super hard, hold nothing back, wow everyone. The feeling of needing to succeed so much was at a pinnacle, at the pinnacle of a hill; which conveniently was where the school was too. You could sit on the front steps of its important beautiful entrance, look down and see a big expanse of lawn. And a little concrete path going down in between the grass that you couldn’t see the rest of anymore at a certain point of slope. Nobody was going to keep me out of where I didn’t feel like I belonged, of where what I wanted wasn’t going to be okay.

Today Larry’s cousin Sharon’s turning 60 and her daughter’s having a dessert party and Larry doesn’t want to go. His mother’s calling. His aunt’s calling. “Don’t break the family up.” “Come on, get over it.” “We all want what’s for the best.” But what if he just doesn’t feel like he belongs? Does it have to mean all those other things?

I wonder if I would feel like I belong in writing grad school. I know I want it desperately. Do I want it just like I wanted it before, to bang my head against a university wall of how I don’t belong, how everything about me is all wrong?

It’s nice being at the top of a hill, because you have the view, especially when it’s a big open space. Except if there were to be predators there they could see you easier too.

Stop signs

2006-10-13T10:20:00.000-04:00

Our neighbourhood is a combination of four-way stop signs and two-way stop signs and old Jewish ladies whose husbands have passed navigating both in the reverie of what used to be their husband’s oversized Oldsmobile’s they can’t let go of.

These reveries sweep and are ranging taking full advantage of any streets that bend. Walking your small child to school on streets without sidewalks, be sure to keep to the grass.

The problem with a husband’s being dead is his not keeping up with the times. It makes him insecure not knowing about four-way stop signs and the protocol. So when his voice whispers through the ventilation and the windshield wipers and the ripped area of the ceiling over top the passenger seat, the lack of knowing makes him act a little bigger, “Mildred, for heaven’s sake it’s nothing,” he crackles into ears a little waxy and stuffed up from maybe a grandson said something different but it seemed too complicated, that kind of care, a lovely boy.

There was a time when there weren’t so many four-way stop signs, just free unfettered passage through the meeting place of the two streets. It wasn’t all gummed up.

I almost went through one this morning, a two-way stop sign, without waiting for a garbage truck to scoot by. I was thinking he was going to stop, that it was a four-way stop sign and was already starting up my car slowly rolling forward to go, for when he did.

The guy in the garbage truck was wearing orange coveralls. Well, not all orange, partly. He gave me a stern look for my corrected mistake, then when he could see my friendly waving contrition his brown eyes smiled.

Action meanings

2006-10-12T12:14:00.000-04:00

I’m at the Dominion again. In the car. It’s Wednesday, Jacob’s drum lesson day, so I’m here. I was going to do it a little different, walk over from parking behind the drum lesson and just get a few things but then it started to rain.

I don’t want to go in because of the fish counter guy. I have a bad feeling about him and don’t want to have to see him and what I think his brain is thinking. I’m always feeling uncomfortable around people I don’t even know, taking their actions to mean something too much to cope with.

Like today, in this particular Dominion the aisles between the vegetables are narrow, and this lady is walking right down the middle not leaving any room for me to get in, so I’m generously waiting for her to exit and she does. But couldn’t she even be polite about it, acknowledge me and what I’m doing for her? But everybody’s different. Maybe that little hum combined with the glance over my left shoulder without looking at me means “thank you” from where she comes from.

So I did make it into the Dominion. We don’t need any fish this week anyway. And if the fish guy’s there, behind the counter when I walk by I’ll just…. maybe I’ll just quietly hum and look over his left shoulder.

But first I'm still deciding in the car in the parking garage which is not a very nice one; dark, underground, very stuffy feeling. I’m listening to music. A lady, finished with her shopping, is walking towards her SUV with her maybe six year old. They look efficient, slim and properly middle class. Her vehicle shines even in the dark.

Oh, oh. If she sees me lurking in my car in the dark in the garage not going anywhere, listening to tunes, avoiding the fish guy she’s gonna think it, that I’m the one who’s the stalker. Me. She already saw the fish guy when she was shopping. The fish guy was fine. It’s not the fish guy lurking in the parking garage.

This is a case where you have to look with enormous intention away from her and her son, look in the direction of the shopping cart return area, look like you are doing some very serious and important thinking business that simply can’t be put off one second longer.

One purchase I made last week when I was shopping at the Dominion was raisins, Sun-Maid raisins. My mom used to give these to us when we were small in little cardboard boxes on the back stoop in response to our pleading to get let back into the house on sunny cold spring days. These ones are in a big plastic container you open up the top of and scrunch your fingers in to get a handful, then seal the lid back on. They’re so good Larry and I gobbled them up in a week with a little help from Jacob. Raisins are healthy too.

I wouldn’t have remembered to pick them up again. They’re in an aisle I don’t usually go to and they weren’t on my mind. But then a box of them, one box, appeared alone, towards the end of an aisle and in amongst the rice crackers. Jacob eats a lot of rice crackers. Like a peculiar case of divine intervention.

Dangers of music

2006-10-11T13:14:00.000-04:00

Last night when I was dozing off I dreamed there was this entire extra house next door to us that belonged to a friend of my mother-in-law’s. She had given it on loan to her. We went inside of it and it was filled with more things we have no use for like all the things she gave us that are in our garage that we don’t need and have to have a garage sale for one day when she’s not paying attention to our ungratefulness. In the dream we were responsible for these things too, an entire extra house of old things we didn’t want to have to look after.

Then I woke up, suddenly, heavily, burdened with it. I was beginning to be afraid I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep. When I realized it wasn’t true. There wasn’t this entire extra house full next door.

Jacob was very excited about going on a class trip today to Forest Valley. What was particularly exciting was the level of independence he was going to be experiencing, separated into an adultless group of four other guys from his class. You’re supposed to do mapping from station to station but Jacob says he already knows how to do mapping. What he would like to do is just wander around under the trees wherever it takes him. I probably should have said something to him about that.

I don’t get sending a litterless lunch. Jacob said that means I have to put everything in plastic containers instead of saran wrap and plastic baggies. I said, look, just put the plastic baggies back in your lunch bag when you’re done with them, the same as what you would do with a plastic container. But according to him, that wouldn’t be the same.

Rain boots is another problem. When do kids need to wear rain boots these days? I had some for him about three years ago. He wore them a few times.

I was sitting in the driveway after I came home from dropping Jacob off; listening to this beautiful local band called Broken Social Scene Larry just introduced me to, the rain rippling on the car window so beautifully. No wonder they always take that shot in movies. I was so stupid when I was a teenager. I didn’t understand anything. The beauty of being that way was in the music listening. Back then I would never get sick of songs I liked. Now I have to be so careful.

I was listening to this U2 CD in the kitchen preparing dinner for a few days in a row. I was gobbling it up. But now I can’t stomach the thought of listening to it again. When I hear Bono on the radio, any Bono, I have to change the station. And I think terrible things about his earnest visions. I think the worst of him. Don’t talk to me about it because I’m malicious.

Sometimes the passion of the music would sweep up so high it would meet and then obscure the sound of the heavy rain on the car roof. Then the rain slowed down so you could see the separate dots of it on the car window like a hundred different dimples breaking out from smiling or like being in a kind of speeded up time that allowed you to see from the inside the craters getting formed on the moon.

Panthers and Leafs

2006-10-09T21:48:00.000-04:00

One time Larry was playing hockey. He was on defense and his fellow defenseman passed the puck to him around the net. It came back high up along the boards and hit him in the shoulder. It hurt so much. He got a bruise that hurt for a week.

Toronto is playing Florida tonight. Florida isn’t a contender. So it’s too bad for Todd Bertuzzi that he got traded there. Gary Roberts is there too. He’s really old for a hockey player but everyone respects his work ethic and his toughness. Gary Roberts used to be on our team. He used to be a Leaf.

The camera pans on Gary Roberts because of how interested we Leaf fans are in him because of how hard he played for us and what he used to mean. He looks quiet. He looks like he wishes he was still a Leaf, still a contender. The camera pans again for us on Roberts. It pans like an old lover who can’t stop stealing another illicit glance and trying to decipher if what it thinks it sees is true; if the look of regret on Roberts’ face is ours, if its true, if it still belongs to us.

For Thanksgiving dinner Larry made a stir fry. We paused the hockey game because we have a new technology on the TV that lets us do that then skip over the commercials. Sometimes the kids miss the commercials though. We were all thankful for different things, some personal and some worldly.

What Larry gave thanks for reminded Eli of a story of how one of his buddies who used to be in the Reserves with him but is now in the Regular Forces was put on casket carrying duty for the dead soldiers coming back from Afghanistan. It was because of all of his previous experience in the Reserves the army felt he could be counted on to take on the extra responsibility. Eli’s friend made a joke about it, giving the regiment he’s in, The Royal Canadian Regiment, a new nick name, The Royal Cemetery Regiment. He’s just new to the Regular Forces. He’s getting used to it.

Todd Bertuzzi is the ex-Canucks player that checked another player from behind in such a hard, vicious and dirty way the player’s neck was broken but fortunately not the kind of neck break that causes paralysis but he did suffer permanent damage and sued Bertuzzi in the court of law and still can’t play. Our family all still felt sorry for Todd even though he shouldn’t have done that.

Jacob’s going to bed. He has school tomorrow. What we can do for that is pause the hockey game between the second and third periods and watch the end of the game after one of us finishes reading him his bedtime story, after he falls asleep.

Subway trains

2006-10-06T17:00:00.000-04:00

Larry likes being on the subway platform when the trains come in from both directions at the same time. Or sometimes one gets in just a little before the other and its wind whoosh. Then it leaves the station first too, not waiting, busy, committed to its procedure; yet heavy, like an aching. The other train goes. The stale subway air fills itself back in.

Then the people from both sides of the tracks go up the escalators at the same time and it bunches at the bottom waiting for each other.

Grocery store

2006-10-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

Now that I’ve been blogging for a few days I’m getting this little narrative voice chasing me around my days. I’ll be standing in line at the grocery store and it will begin its buzz in my ear, high pitched like a mosquito yet conversational and maybe clever, pressing its narration on the moment. I suspect it’s a wannabe and not the real thing.

The real thing is more just observing things in the quiet with no noisy buzz. Like looking at the guy behind the fish counter I never look at. At the grocery store. He wears this big white fish coat over top of his clothes with the buttons done up at the top but not at the bottom. You might also call it a lab coat. If he worked in a lab it would be a lab coat. It looks like he’s very fat around the middle under the coat but slim in the arms and legs and face. He has soft brown skin and ears that stick out, droopy bleak eyes. He’s younger than I thought.

The problem with looking at people more is they notice. The guy behind the fish counter, his eyes keep hooking back into mine with big question marks jumping out of them of why am I looking at him the way I am? Is there something wrong? Then when I walk away, contemplating the cuts of meat in the meat refrigerators, I can feel his eyes still on me, subtle, impossible for anyone to see like a fine clear fishing line. I’m pretty sure he’s checking out my butt.

Coming out of this I pass an older man. White hair, thick glasses and taking those small, older-person-with-thick-glasses, “I’m looking around and up and feeling very lost” steps. He looks at me and speaks. So I think I must know him. He kind of looks familiar, maybe kind of like a man I know from my son’s baseball league. I say, “Hi,” because I really am the kind of person who forgets people I’m not supposed to, forgets people I should know. It freaks me out I do that. I’m sorry.

But he was just talking to himself. We didn’t know each other. He was saying how he’d forgotten something. I guess the going back because of forgetting went with his being old too, which drifted back to me, what he was saying, as he went by, a stream of misunderstanding becoming understanding, like when the wake hits from a boat that’s passed.

I was thinking about how it’s easier to read the faces of people the same age as you. When I was young an older person’s face was like a mask to me, indecipherable. Now that I am that age I used to think was so old, all the wrinkles and black bags and funny weird moles make sense. They invite. And young people’s faces seem flat and impenetrable. I was thinking about Joan Rivers and all her face lifts to make her look young. I was thinking how it makes her face look empty, sterile and waiting like a neatly folded hospital bed.

Couch seat cushions

2006-10-04T10:26:00.000-04:00

Apparently it’s the time of year a lot of people purchase new couches. The reason I say this is because there’s a lot of old couches being put out by the side of the road. I am surprised how many people put out their old couches without the cushion part that you sit on attached. Because what good is a couch without the cushion part?

What I think it is that they don’t want anyone to get to share their old couch with them. They want the usefulness of the couch to end with them. It’s their couch and no one else’s. Like not wanting to share things when you’re a kid just for the sake of it, because it’s yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. Even when you don’t need it any more.

Maybe it’s an intimacy thing. Like you spend so much time sitting on your couch you’re afraid that if other people sit on it too, then if time were to shift just a little backwards it would be like they were there with you in your living room watching the football game too but what if they were cheering for the other side? What if there were uncomfortable disagreements?

When I see a couch like that by the curb, the couch back exaggeratedly long from the lack of sitting cushions I think of murder. I think of bloody dripping cushions stashed somewhere away out of sight, evidence. But it would be a couch that the body was somehow awkwardly able not to be touching the back of.

Or an incontinent granny also stashed away but sneaking out so she can sit stubbornly on it, the couch, but then unknowingly leaking too many times on the seat cushions to the point of there’s nothing you can do to fix it anymore. All that’s left to do is glare and put the sofa out. Fill garbage bags with the cushions. Put them out on separate garbage days so no one pieces the awkwardness of it together.

A neighbour down the street from us actually put two couches out, included the cushions and covered them both with thin clear plastic. Talk about consideration! Wherever did they find sheets of plastic the perfect size to fit their couch? Some people are so organized.

What’s ideal about covering them up with plastic is that if it rains before someone finds the couch and decides they want to take it home, the couch doesn’t get ruined. Except I looked closely at these couches and I don’t know who would want them. They were in very bad condition. The fabric was all splitting, bursting open along the seams of the cushions.

Honey and Apples

2006-10-03T11:48:00.000-04:00

I would have liked to have gone to synagogue for Yom Kippur but I wanted to get the new futon couch out of the living room and down to Larry’s studio. It’s been sitting in the living room for over a week now, okay more like sprawled all over the living room like a teenager surrounded by various junk food options. Because there’s three parts, the futon, the sofa frame and the flat wooden slat part the futon lays on top of.

First I was putzing around the house waiting for Larry to be ready to start the operation. I was preparing the kitchen table for breaking the fast in the evening. On Yom Kippur you go all day without eating, turning deeply into yourself and discussing with God how things really need to be for the year ahead. The table is supposed to be ready already because you’re not supposed to work you’re so busy concentrating on praying.

I’m not so good at those kinds of things yet. I’m not a good planner because of making last minute decisions a lot. Like should we break the fast over at one of Larry’s relatives on the other side of the family which is what we usually do, or not. Should we concede once again how everyone on that side of the family is right that the way we are Jewish isn’t good enough, or not. For example moving furniture wouldn’t be considered as properly suiting Yom Kippur. In fact for most people it would be very hard to even fathom how moving furniture might be considered spiritual.

I love moving furniture around. Larry’s skeptical. Also it kind of upsets him how crazy I am for it, how eager I am to get in his private work studio, roll up my sleeves and rearrange to better accommodate his needs. What was very spiritual of me was how I really listened to his concern that I not barge and take over all over the place, be respectful of his space. What was spiritual of him was to explain in detail how he was feeling to me and not expect me just to know and not freaking out on me when I acted how I said I wouldn’t by accident a few times anyway.

Then Eli even joined in. Downstairs is Larry’s studio and Eli’s apartment. Eli heard us clearing out the space for the couch which is so when Larry feels like it he can just sit down and relax and draw and not be all cramped up in front of his computer. So Eli couldn’t help but do some work cleaning up his place. (Thank God) What I'm saying about Eli joining in is not about one of my subtle little observations. It’s what Eli said, that he felt compelled.

What I would say is that he felt spiritually compelled.

So poor Bubby, who is really not my Bubby but my kids’, was left to her own devices all by herself at synagogue. Not really all by herself, because she goes with her sister. And everyone at the synagogue is her friend and thinks she is so wonderful. She graciously greets them all, teeth, face, hair, clothes, all perfect. She’s so much that way that when you’re with her you don’t want to be because it’s like she’s not with you or maybe at most you feel like a daughter-in-law prop. Or whatever it is you are in relation to her.

When I called up Leslie’s house to let them know we wouldn’t be coming, her husband was home. They’re having the “family” breaking of the fast there. They’re doctors but he’s not Jewish. You’d think that his not being Jewish would suggest what a liberal family we really are. But the reason he’s acceptable is because of the subsection about being respectful to new family members with prestigious jobs. He’s home and he picks up the phone. What a pretentious goody-goody jerk. It would be better if he was Jewish. If he was Jewish I could have counted on him being in synagogue so I could leave a message. I’m telling him how sorry we are we won’t be able to make it. He’s got this kind of pompous voice so he’s signing off saying, “May your fall be a good one.”

That’s his substitute for Shana Tova or Happy New Year or “I hope your year is terrific,” which is the Jewish custom. I can tell he’s been thinking about the right thing to say to perfectly meet the level of the occasion but maintain his position as the “not Jewish guy” in the family.

I should be nice to him and not bitter. I should be sweet to him like honey and apples for a sweet new year.

Spacing out

2006-10-02T11:03:00.000-04:00

We stayed home today. For Yom Kippur.

The night before last we went out for Nuit Blanche. It was so amazing. There were so many people. Usually it's just us it seems, trolling the gallery scene. We went to bed so late.

Then we had to get up right away the next morning to go to a ceremony for the Zaglembie society. Every year the day before Yom Kippur we do this. This year was special because they got a new monument to commemorate the people they commemorate every year. There's maybe six of them in a semi-circle in black, only not a full semi-circle more an eighth of a semi. You feel like they're these spirits leaning up and over top of you. It's kind of a nice protected feeling. In between them are smaller stone units to hold the commemoration candles.

There were speeches. I was just in the mood to space out for the speeches today. Maybe I was listening a bit. My son, Jacob, came up to me at a certain point towards the end of one of the speeches. He was getting bored.

I think kids need to be bored more. He was being bored in a big open field with some trees, admittedly more would have been better and a ton of gravestones. He's never even been afraid of creepy things under his bed. I think it was a good place for him to be bored.

It was during this distraction that Larry exclaimed to me that the guy saying the speech just urged the crowd on to vengence for what happened. (Larry = husband) Then I wished Jacob hadn't interrupted me so I could have heard it for myself. But really I'm not sure if I was listening at that point myself anyway.